Nowadays, digital communication platforms are a key part of people’s life and the younger population is more addicted from online forms of communication. At first, there is a need to discover the whole topic of common world digitalization and the origin of digital communication platforms for that terms of social networks and social media have to be disclosed. According to Will Kenton: “Social networking is the use of Internet-based social media sites to stay connected with friends, family, colleagues, customers, or clients. Social networking can have a social purpose, a business purpose, or both, through sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, among others.” (Kenton, 2020)
Networks are playing a tremendous role in solving human problems among which there is the functioning of companies, spiritual growth, learning, and teaching. The term is existing is not so long just for 70 years from 1954, when it was created in a theory by mathematicians.
(Mitchell, 1974) In the same decade, the first electronic mail was designed, it was ARPA Net, and it was used for military purposes. (Featherly, 2003) Nevertheless, there was created the Internet chat, IRC, in 1988; (Stenberg, 2011) later Randy Conrads presented Classmates.com in the middle of 1990s. (People Connect, 2020) Today there are a huge number of digital communication platforms which were absolutely changed for fifty years, among them are well-known digital communication platforms. To put it simply, it is a structure that is linked by one or many interconnections such as friendship, love, ideas, business, opinions, values, conflicts, trade, and, of course, education.
The digital communication platforms about which the thesis is being aimed on internal communication at universities where all members of one institution can collaborate with each other for the purpose of studying. The forms of platforms were developed some decades ago and it is improving every year especially due to conditions of coronavirus quarantine when most of the universities were transferred to the form of online education.
In addition, the digital communication platforms allow their users to have real–time contacts using different communication methods such as sending written and voice messages, graphs, pictures, screenshots, and various files and doing video and audio calls.
What is more, those platforms are required to have comfortable for people conditions in doing common deals and reaching common goals.
Under those circumstances, the most popular digital communication platforms are Facebook it has 2.7 billion users. (Statista, 2020) The statistical data is in the second quarter of 2020. According to Statista, it is the most international platform which connects almost three billion people around the globe as it is not only the platform for posting photos and videos, but also for communication with others. The next one is WhatsApp which links more than 2 billion accounts. In the third place, there is WeChat where are 1.2 billion people, however, it is very famous in China and looks like WhatsApp. (Statista, 2020) As it is written in Statista from 2020, the next places are Instagram (1,1 billion), Telegram (400 million), and many others. Important to realize, there is a difference in the Russian market, the most popular social networks are varying from those which are used in Europe, Asia, and America. For example, people prefer to interact through VKontakte and Odnoklassniki rather than through Facebook. Looking at statistics, VKontanke has more than 445 million users what is three-time higher than the amount of Russian population as well as post-Soviet countries, and people who speak Russia are using the platform, too. (OkeyGeek, 2018) However, the best way to see the real statistics and the flow of people can be calculated by statistical coverage of people who visited a social network at least once a month.
According to such calculation, the most popular were VK (which combines 66 percent of people from the total amount of population in a country), WhatsApp (63 percent), Instagram (56.2 percent), Odnoklassniki (41.8 percent) and on fifth place is Facebook with the coverage 40.7 percent from all people in a country. (Indsite, 2020) All statistics are for 2020. Given these points, YouTube is not taking into account as it is not a social network.
To be more precise, there is a need to distinguish social media and social networking from each other to be more accurate in the analysis. Social media is media which a person creates and uploads to the media platforms it can be blogs, video, podcast, and many others. It is the media that was created by a human being and was published in social media channels.
While social networks are mostly digital platforms where people are interacting and the example of such websites are Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and many others. (Jamie, 2021) The core difference is in human interaction in networks.
Despite the fact that there were shown statistics for the most well-known social networks, not of them are so frequently using for educational purposes. Consequently, there is a need to separate another group of digital platforms which will be applicable for study purposes such as Skype, Edmodo, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and some products of Google such as Hangouts, Classroom, Docs Editors, Groups, Meet, and many others. (Jamie, 2021) Those web pages are aimed at educational purposes mostly as they allow to make video calls, create and translate presentations, write in a chat, write and upload documents. (Jamie, 2021) These features are required for teaching and learning and are suitable for teachers and students. Nevertheless, some of them have limitations on usage; for instance, Zoom allows to have a video call for more than two people longer than 40 minutes. (Zoom, 2021) If users would like to speak more than free allowed time they have to subscribe to the more expensive version of Zoom. (Zoom, 2021) The same option works for universities, but they have special offers which are not beneficial for them than just so simple users.
Another useful feature of social networks is the ability to record videos of lectures. This can also be used to record video lectures that include a presentation, video, and sound or voice of participants of any Zoom meeting. What is more, video recording can be paused and then continued what is suitable for a full understanding of lectures. The video recording is saved after it is turned off and the conference ends. It is important to note that videos made in Zoom are very lightweight and it is good to save all of them on one computer. Notably, this will allow students to easily upload such files to cloud services and include links in the online course system. In this case, such a format of education is especially beneficial for those who need to listen to the same information many times in order to remember or learn it.
1.1.1 Forms of social networks and of social media
There were found three types of social networks which are divided according to their main functions and the group of people who will potentially use them. Social networks can be spread on public social networks, social communities, and employee social networks, the difference between them consists in the purpose of use. To be more precise, social communities are managed by corporations with the goal to interact with customers, business partners, and others; another type, employee social networks, are used inside of a company, while public social networks are for the common use of all people. (see Img.1.) The last type is Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Certainly, it is significant to see the difference of the forms of social networks to understand the opportunities and threats of each of the type for doing business, especially, for universities.
Img. 1. Three Types of Social Networks. Source: (Hughes, 2013)
Each of the types has its benefits and minuses, public social networks will not be suitable for the whole study processes as they are for the big audience where only conversation, small videos, and photos sharing are possible. Definitely, it can be used just for the conversation among students, but it is uncomfortable for productive deeper discussions. Comparatively with public social networks, social communities type let people have deeper engagement with each other or between students and professors. (Hughes, 2013) This type is more suitable for business–to–business models when an organization has direct contact with
customers and when customers can communicate with each other. (Hughes, 2013) The third type, employee social networks, is appropriate for internal communication and knowledge sharing of people from one university or company. (Hughes, 2013) A bright example is Slack or Microsoft Teams where employees or students and professors can connect and learn something from this collaboration with help of sharing documents or any other materials required for that. (Hughes, 2013)
The next step is discovering social media types in order to understand the main difference between social media, networks, and digital communication platforms. There are many varied types of social media among them are discussion forums, media sharing networks, personal networks, and others which are demonstrated in image 2. The only parts of social media types which can be used for the revelation of the thesis topic are discussion forums where students can discuss their common issues, tasks, and knowledge, the next one is interest-based networks where people who have mutual concern are contacting each other and also media sharing networks when people have an opportunity to send each other their media files which can be also required for education purposes. (CoSM, 2021) In fact, the bright example of the last type is YouTube where people are uploading their video files and many students are using the platform for finding answers to their study questions. (CoSM, 2021) Nevertheless, the type is not private enough and professors usually do not do special videos for their students and do not upload them on YouTube channels.
Img. 2. Types of Social Media. Source: (CoSM, 2021)
The last two types of social networks from the first image are connected with the idea of digital communication platforms as they are both aimed at internal communication inside of a company or university. Moreover, communication networks that are applied at companies and at universities should be secured from external users as some information can be too private. (Capizmo, 2020) The main functions of the digital communication platforms are the opportunity to send emails, instant messaging, voice and video messages, to have common for internal users’ calendars with main events, to do audio and video conferences, to upload different files for common usage and some other features which
make the process of internal collaboration easier. (Capizmo, 2020) However, usually one university or company is working with not only one digital platform but have a subscription for some of them. It happens as well as people would like to get better quality for each of function. For example, students can send messages via Slack, find uploaded materials required for studying at own universities’ web platform, to have video lectures at Zoom and to send email in Microsoft Outlook.