New Media Superpowers

LIKE the Cold War of the past, new superpowers have emerged in the New Media landscape and are poised to stamp their authority even further in the year ahead. Two of them - Google and Facebook - influence societies and cultures by their sheer size and reach, while the third - WikiLeaks - epitomises the power of information.

  The California-based Google is one of the world's most dominant brands, and has a near monopoly of web search and online search advertising. It owns YouTube, Blogger, and with a market value of US$190 billion, has bought up smaller companies at will to enter new markets and expand its digital empire.
  Google has moved into operating system and application software, mobile telephony, email, web browsers, maps and video. It is also building the world's biggest digital library of books and visual materials.
  In 2010, Google was mired in a controversy over censorship in China, and has also come under increased scrutiny from anti-trust authorities in both the US and Europe.

  If you don’t appear on a Google search, you don’t exist in the Internet. Whatever appears higher in a Google search result, meanwhile, will have a bigger impact on the perception of the particular subject - whether it is a product, person, corporation, politician, holiday destination, government, or even an entire nation.
  A new field of study called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was created to learn how to become more prominent in search results, crucial for anyone seeking to reach the public, because Google is where most people go first on the web.

 
  
  Where Internet users spend more time, however, is in social networking sites, and this is where the next superpower - Facebook - is the clear leader with more than 500 million users.
  Created by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University six years ago, Facebook is now ranked second in worldwide traffic. Zuckerberg himself is worth an estimated US$6.9 billion.
  In regional Internet markets, Facebook penetration is highest in North America (69 percent), Middle East-Africa (67 percent), Latin America (58 percent), Europe (57 percent), and Asia-Pacific (17 percent).

  According to Lou Kerner, a social media analyst with Wedbush Securities, social media is an increasingly important part of how to reach people and is a growing part of every marketer's budget.
  "You do not want to fight Facebook, you want to embrace Facebook and leverage Facebook because this is where people are going to sped increasing amounts of time," he said in a recent article.
  In some countries, courts have recognised notices and summons posted on Facebook as legally binding, and employers have been known to fire staff over posts made on the network. It has introduced new words like "facebooking" and "unfriend" into the English language.
  Everyone from schoolchildren to heads of state, TV shows to political parties, and even police and criminal syndicates are on Facebook. It can be used for either good or evil, but is certainly a force to be reckoned with.

  Facebook has spawned peculiar spin-offs like PleaseRobMe.com, which collects status updates from Twitter and Foursquare that indicate a person is away from home.
  Facebook's role in the political process, meanwhile, reinforced how popular and powerful the social network had become, especially for young people, to interact and voice opinions. Over one million people installed the Facebook application 'US politics' to take part in debate groups organised around specific topics, register to vote and message questions.
  Facebook has shut out Google from most of its content (a Google search will only reveal if a person has a Facebook profile, and nothing else) and these two superpowers will likely clash again in 2011 with plans to introduce the @facebook.com email service (to rival Google's Gmail?) and "Facebook Questions", which lets members ask questions and get answers from other members (like a search engine).

  But if it's secrets you want, look to the third new media phenomenon of the year - WikiLeaks.
  Created by Australian Internet activist Julian Assange, the non-profit WikiLeaks gained notoriety in April when it posted a video from a 2007 incident in which Iraqi civilians and journalists were killed by US forces. In July, it released the Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan.
  It has won a number of awards for its exposes, including the Economist magazine New Media Award, and Amnesty International's UK Media Award. In May 2010, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of "websites that could totally change the news".

  In November, WikiLeaks began releasing what it said were US State Department diplomatic cables. The contents include numerous unguarded comments and revelations which have so far embarrassed the US and threatened to sour ties between countries and leaders.
  In retaliation, WikiLeaks was hit with denial-of-service attacks, kicked off servers in the US and France, and lost major revenue sources when companies like Amazon.com, PayPal, MasterCard, Visa Inc, and PostFinance severed ties.
  But over a thousand mirror sites have sprung up since then, and supportive activists and hackers have attacked sites of companies that oppose WikiLeaks as part of Operation Avenge Assange.
  No wonder some US lawmakers want to classify WikiLeaks as a "foreign terrorist organisation" and cliam that it "presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the US".
 But if they thought the WikiLeaks exposés in 2010 rattled and shocked politicians and governments, expect to see more in 2011.

  Assange, who once spoke at a Hack In The Box conference in Kuala Lumpur, told Forbes magazine that he was planning another "megaleak" for early in 2011, which would involve "a big U.S. bank".
  His lawyer, Mark Stephens, was more ominous, telling BBC that WikiLeaks had information it considers to be a "thermo-nuclear device" which it would release if the organisation needs to defend itself.
  This time, WikiLeaks will not be alone.
  Assange's former colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left the organisation due to internal conflicts in September, is already setting up a rival called Openleaks.org.
  Other whistle-blowing sites will likely follow.