Using Social Media for Dynamic Information Dissemination in the 21st Century

Introduction

The advent and application of information and communication technology (ICT) in library functions and services has brought about a revolution in the use of information and librarians’ job performance. Hence, the information outlook of the world has changed drastically as a result of this invention of social media, further resulting in the exchange of ideas, feelings, pictures, and videos as tools for knowledge acquisition. Among the present innovations in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are the social media, which stands out among the best in the group of internet-based applications and is built on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 which allows the creation of user-generated content (Kaplan & Haenlein 2010). The Media and MediaLive International Conference that was held in San Francisco, October 2004, Tim O’Reilly and his colleagues presented Web 2.0 and its features as a forum for information interaction. In 2016, Lim Berners Lee proposed Web 3.0 that features reading, writing, and knowledge application in the social realm.

The main goal of Web 3.0 technology is to make it easier for web users to contribute information in a way that computers can understand, process, and share. These advancements in Web technology would enable Web applications to perform time-saving tasks such as collating data from various sources and assisting users inefficiently searching for specific information based on their needs. The rapid increase in the number of semantic markups available on the Web, the number of organizations beginning to conduct research and development activities in the field, and the number of Web 3.0 applications that now exist in recent years has prompted rising interest in the new generation of Web. Technologies have changed the traditional way of education to the modern way of learning, like artificial intelligence (Di Vaio et al. 2020). This merger is primarily concerned with the development and upkeep of world models that allow reasoning about themselves and their associated data (Lassila & Hendler, 2017). Web 3.0 provides an opportunity for knowledge connection and use. Since then, the growing dimension and the use of social media among students and researchers have been overwhelming.

As of March 31, 2019, Facebook registered 2.38 billion monthly active users and 1.56 billion daily active users (Facebook 2019). In 2022, the total number of social media users is expected to reach 3.29 billion, accounting for 42.3 percent of the global population (eMarketer 2018). Given the enormous potential audience that spends several hours a day on social media across multiple channels. Social media has also been adopted by academics, with a large body of work on social media marketing and related topics. People can now be reached more easily. Social media “gives people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them “(Facebook 2019).