That is, "since the arrival of the World Wide Web and the spread of mobile communications, mediated connectivity has been quietly normalized as central to a consolidating 'global imaginary'".
Along with these improvements, new media such as social networking systems (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Google+), websites that provide access to user-generated content (e.g. Youtube, Myspace, Flickr), trading and marketing sites (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Groupon) and also game sites (e.g. FarmVille, The Sims Social) have become an essential part of everyday life of an average user:[2] "Just as electricity in the 19th and 20th centuries transformed societies by penetrating every fibre of people's personal and professional lives, network connectivity is probably the most powerful transformative force in early 21st-century cultures".
[4] This made a shift in the understanding of the nature of connectivity and moved the initial focus just from a technical side of the notion to its increasingly acquired techno-socio-cultural character.
[4][5] As mentioned before, connectivity is built on the principles of Web 2.0. that promote an openness, create the vision of empowerment of the user in the generation of a new content and coordination of the information flow on the Internet.
[4] Several scholars (van Dijck, Gillespie) mention in their works the ambiguity of the term "platform" that promises to bring openness, access, to be neutral and help people build social connections and participate in online activities, but in fact implies a more complicated structure of the media, most of the time created for the profit purposes and as the enhancement of control under the users.