Essay 2 Social Media and Traditional/mass Media

Social media are very different with mass media, such as newspapers, television, radio, and magizine, etc. Comparing with those mass media, social media are more convenient and cheaper to let anyone to publish or access information.

The common aspect of social media and mass is both of them can reach from the niche audiences to large size audiences. But for most ordinary people, the social media are available to them with little or no cost, meanwhile the mass media is always controlled by more profit organizations. Mass media need more specific skills to do it, it means it need more time and expense for production, but social media has very simple process, anyone can learn to use it fast and just can be capable of virtually instantaneous responses; only the participants determine any delay in response.

And also through using the social media, people can digitally identify themselves, this break the limitation of being a carbon-based life-form. Social media give everyone the opportunity to express themselves. And social media can help scale this to new heights, for instance a person now on MySpace may can have thousands upon thousands of friends. Now a person can express him/herself with multidimensional, multimedia depth via text, photos, audio and video to realize this.For mass media it's not possible to develop personal product, since it's hard for the mass media to follow every individual audience to develop the product just suit for him/her. But social media can achieve this.

But there is one crucial thing that social media industrvy have to notice the quality of the products. Since as the above mentioned, the cost and skill are not big concern for social media industry, the entering barriers are so low, the quality of content is hard to control. How to control the quality uncertainty, maybe the we should consider the anonymity is a source of it. In social network, anyone can publish or access information anonymity. So with the anonymity, it is harder to identify who is doing what and why. There will always be ill-intentioned individuals and groups will outnumber the bad issue through the social media network. For instance, the Youtube provides anonymity in a weird way, because even if thousands of people see someone's video, those viewing it don’t necessarily know anything about them. The good side is anyone can publish his/her opinion without fearing, but the bad side is anonymity breeds divisiveness may well harm the long-term success of a valuable idea, and brings in some low quality contents.

However I believe with any technology, there are benevolent uses and malevolent ones. So finally there always are some create a vibrant, transparent, and effective social media service can be built. For example now the Wikipedia already have some ways to successfully encourage the production of quality content.

By Wang, Yiqing