Augmenting Social Media Accessibility

The popularity of social media is affecting society as they are changing the way communication, collaboration, interaction, and information are produced and consumed. In current society, a debate is discussing whether social media can be seen as a powerful democratizing tool or as a powerful tool that will enlarge social differences. Far from settling this debate, in this paper we propose an architecture to bring social media into the massmedia mainstream. The proposed architecture, named SOMFA (SOcial Media For All), finds, gets, transforms, and enriches social media contents for a presentation over TV sets, so that people with technological, sociological, geographical, or physical limitations may enjoy social media and may participate to the social media revolution. A prototype implementation of SOMFA shows the feasibility of our approach, as Web social media can be seen and read as well as ordinary TV programs. By giving the opportunity to everyone to access to social media, SOMFA can be considered a democratic agent as it provides a novel service to society.