Some concepts at the beginning of the course

Social media analytics, just as its name implies, is a course that analyze the statistic and mine the data of social network.  However, in the lecture one, Rosanna said that social media analytics is not only about data mining and statistical analysis while the social media services are not only technological existences. The course is an interdisciplinary science which consists of humanities and technologies.

But back to the concept of social media, what is social media? I thought it is the same concept as social network and both of them are the platform as Facebook, Twitter and Wechat before learning lecture one. However, in fact, they are not the same things. Social network is a social structure. The structure is made of a person or a group of people who are connected to each other while social media is, from Wikipedia, information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. They are intertwined with each other and the overlapping area is about the online social networks.

Through the lecture one, I learn some basic concepts(e.g, Social cognition) about social media analytics course, which will helps me grasp the course more deeply in the future.