20 January 2010
Rise of a new power: Social Media
What are your thoughts after watching the video? If you agree with the video, then you probably believe that social media will overtake our traditional media as the new media by which people communicate. Just take a look around you, how many of the people around you that you know use social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster, Twitter or even blogs? Many do nowadays and more are turning to them as a new and easier way to communicate then the traditional snail mail or email.
Sharing an idea or thought is as simple as logging in and publishing a new post. Within minutes, a group of people will know what you are broadcasting if they happen to come across your posts or tweets (as they called on Twitter). Information and pictures can be shared easily within minutes as compared to days back in the past.
Social media has changed the way that people communicate with each other now. Like mentioned in the video, we no longer search for the news, the news find us now and in the future, we will no longer need to go around searching for products and services, they will find their way to us via social media. The reason being that social media is a form of media whereby information is meant to be disseminated through social interaction.
Social media allows for inexpensive means to broadcast information to anyone anywhere. There are accessible tools that enable anyone, even home users to utilise them to access or publish information. Many social networking sites only require users to sign up for free accounts to start using them. It is also cheaper to advertise your products or services on social media mediums than to use traditional means like newspapers, radio or the television. Another great benefit is that social media can reach a global audience as the contents are hosted on the internet. What this means is that a user can read the news anywhere in the world as long as they have access to the internet unless traditional print media where they would either have to bring the whole stack of papers along when they travel or get the news firm to deliver it to them. Alterations can be done easily and instantly on social media by means of comments or editing whereas traditional means like papers, magazines and the television would involve more work like recalling the previous edition and reprinting the newer corrected edition.
The current benefits of social media far out weight the cons of it and I strongly believe that social media is not just a fad but will overtake modern means of communication and become the way that people commuicate in future. What do you guys think? Is social media just a fad and will it evolve into something more powerful and able to reach a wider audience with the half the effort?
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Omg, such impressive material that you show me. Didn't social media is so important!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThe importance and power of social media is increasing everyday. No way we can escape it huh.
ReplyDeletehi daryl!
ReplyDeletepersonally, i feel that people now are actually taking granted for social media as what you have mentioned, news come to us, not us. social media will definitely evolve into something more powerful as technology improve every minute. but will it then lead to more of us taking granted of social media?
jiaman
I think more people will take it for granted and then we will breed a population of lazy people. Take this video for example, it is taken from YouTube and YouTube is part of social media. The video tells us all the facts so that we do not have to go around looking for it but this would not be the case a few years ago. We would have to go and search for what we want to know back then.
ReplyDeleteHi YG,
ReplyDeleteI pretty much agree with the video that social media and its influence is wide-reaching. Even the numbers doesn't surprise me. I feel that social media is a form of communication that was breed out of convenience and accessibility and most of all, our very human need to socialise.
Because of our desire to reach others quickly, effectively and economically, it is sensible that we use the internet as a leverage to transmit information from one to the other. From the dawn of technology we have tried innumerable ways and methods to link neighbor to neighbor in a quicker and more efficient way. As time progressed, it became village to village, tribe to tribe, city to city, country to country, continent to continent and eventually, end to end. It doesn't come to a surprise that the web caught on much faster compared to the radio, because information takes much lesser time to get passed from one to the other compared to the past.
Personally my life does not revolve around the social media at all. When I'm surfing Youtube, I'm not expecting to be educated that's why I do not check up and validate the claims the content provider makes, unless it is a documentary. I hardly check my facebook or any other social networking sites.The only exception is probably Wikipedia which I admit to extreme frequent usage. Although I wouldn't worry about too much about reputable sites like Wikipedia whose accuracy is touted to be comparable to that of Britannica. For the video, I think for those who are "fact-conscious" they will make the effort to go to the website to check up on the claims.
I think users who surf blogs for accurate information is certainly a mistake. Unless of course the author is a relevant expert in the field in which case is very reliable. One good example would be Richard Carrier's blog.
Personally I think that communication is important, it is just a matter of content that separates the trivial from the important.
Hey YG,
ReplyDeleteI've came across an interesting link by Stephen Fry about the social media -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_4yrBoA2x4
In it, he mentions about the internet and how the young generations from ages past and present differed from each other. He also mentioned about the advent of varying technologies that were approached apprehensively but were eventually adopted as an indispensable part of the human life. Computer, mailboxes and even novels were some of the few examples given.
I like to echo Stephen Fry about the internet being the next technology to fear, like its predecessors, there is much to fear about the unknown but sometimes it is necessary to embrace them for their potential benefits outweighs the costs. Take for example, car crashes occur daily but that should not be the reason why we pull them out of usage.
Social networking sites does prove to be detrimental to the users in some ways. I'm sure you've heard of the employee whose picture his friends uploaded onto the popular networking site "Facebook" while they were having fun on the beach, which was all and well except that he was supposed to be on his sick leave and his boss happened to saw the post in the latest feed. I think he got fired. I'm not too sure.
Anyway, I read in the papers yesterday about how an Australian family got wind of news of their son's death by a social networking site. Because of a delay by the police, the family were not notified of the tragic death.
I don't see any averse implications from the vast reaches of the social media, but we can witnesses the speed and availability of information brought to us by social media.
"There is nothing permanent except change."
- Heraclitus
Peace,
R
Welcome to the world of insane tech-savvy world. If you don't follow, you will be known as an ignorant or someone who is old-fashioned. This thinking has to be changed! We are indeed facing a speedy change from being physical to virtual. Yet, they are as real as you and me. Good entry on social media revolution, loved it.
ReplyDeleteI agreed that the social media has becomes part of our life now. We communicate often through emails, msn or social platforms like twitter and facebook. Now that we have Fb and twitter, we hardly sms either to get in contact with friends that we miss out recently. We will go on facebook and type on the wall : HEY HOW ARE YOU DOING ?
ReplyDeleteThe benefits are convenient and easy. But the disadvantage is that how are we able to communicate effectively with others physically in the real world, if we rely overly on the virtual communication.
Social media has indeed changed the way that we communicate with our peers and utilise information from them. The downside is that we tend to rely more on them than on credible sources like the newspapers, radtio and television for information.
ReplyDeletePeople are taking for granted social media nowadays as there are some that do not even bother to check on the accuracy of news reports before reading.
ReplyDeletewe can never live in the age where social media is totally kicked out of our life.
ReplyDeletesocial media social media. it spoil everything that is meant to be done face to face! you talk face to face with people less often and use facebook more often. pple are losing real contacts!!
ReplyDeleteMedia is around us wherever we go. Social media is just a form of word of mouth. It is of course cheaper to use social media to spread the information but the main and real information might not be spread. The info will just evolve into something that the original guy doesn't want.
ReplyDeleteSocial media is very much taking over the way that people are communicating with one and another nowadays and experts have projected that at this rate, all forms of communication will take place via social networking sites by 2015. Sounds scary huh? That means there will be lesser face to face interactions which is not good as verbal and face to face communication is still needed for a lot of purposes especially for businesses.
ReplyDeleteCertainly, having a personal touch still makes communication more special, but in this rapidly-progressing, evolving era of the Internet, it's difficult to stick to the old ways.
ReplyDeleteIn this day and age, time/speed is of the essence. With the majority of homes and people being wired to the interwebs, social media has become the norm, and will most certainly become the most dominant form of communication (if it isn't already).