The Social Media Story: Understanding it in a Dynamic between Proactivity and Consumption
The Social Media Story: Understanding it in a Dynamic between Proactivity and Consumption

Summary/Abstract: Is social media a repository of magical media power? Does it have an inherit structure that allows it to be dispensed or triggered at a user’s whim at the first sign of trouble? These questions motivated this study. The concern of this research is to describe the relationship established by Romanian users with social media, in a time in which the European continent was seeing protests in its major cities. The impulse feeding this scientific research has been the use of social media to gather public support for political causes. Social media has been presented as underpinning recent political events, both in Romania and in Europe. The importance of social media content tends to be perceived in a less skeptical spirit than it is in this article. Based on the findings, we can state that social media is not a stable tool for civic action as it can also rapidly shift from informative to entertaining. Qualitative research revealed the context in which individuals viewed the events in the University Square. The results of this research proved to be less optimistic than the general enthusiastic perception of social media as an all powerful tool able to call the masses to democratic activism.

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