Cyberpsychology at Work

Technologies are indispensable and highly associated with individuals, businesses and organizations. Numerous eminent technologies are developed by firms and industries to gain competitive advantage in the market. The mode of lifestyle of individuals was also affected by technologies, either in social or occupational. Social media are one of the technologies which were invented and became contemporary prevalent. The origin of social media came from the “Usernet” inaugurated by Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis of the Duke University in 1979. It was “a worldwide discussion system that allowed internet users to post public messages” (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010: 60). It then grew into various kinds of social websites and users of these websites surged. Two major concepts of social media were constantly discussed with it – Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Web 2.0 is the foundation of social media which published composite information provided by massive users, whereas User Generated Content states the content shown in these websites and how they would be utilized. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010: 62) classified social media into six categories – “blogs”, “social networking sites”, “virtue social worlds”, “collaborative projects”, “content communities” and “virtue game worlds”. The first three are regarded as high level of self-presentation or self-disclosure and the latter three are perceived as low level of self-presentation or self-disclosure in which individuals could avoid being exposed to the outside world by disguise. In terms of the degree of social presence or media richness, blogs and collaborative projects are the highest, social networking sites and content communities are in the medium and the lowest is the virtue social worlds and v...

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...ing trend and powerful tools for companies. They are, however, against the concept of Romanticism. Romantics are good at pursuing human nature and emphasizing that the right of making choices should be on human rather than the technology. Nevertheless they rejected the Futurism view that technology can benefit human beings, are too objective that it endangered human beings, assumed that technology can control human minds, rather than believing the Managerialism view that it depends on the method used by managers and can enhance the organizational performance. The partialities of Romanticism are they omitted the fact that technology can improve human lives and modify organizations and little evidence supported their assumption. The assumption and views of Romantics are too extreme and they should admit that technology can bring both benefits and detriments to humans.