Social Media - Week 2

2011.... we are now living in a world fuelled by all the social media.

maybe we have already long forgotten, that a long long time ago (or maybe not that long), that we used to be solely dependent on the traditional media, eg newspaper, radio, television. Those were the days then... and thinking back, news took a little longer to reach us as compared to today, especially news that seemed a little further from us geographically.

Today, i dare say that we can learn of any event that happened around the world within 10 mins, and that's is all thanks to the thing called social media, like youtube, blogs, podcasts, facebook and twitter. And with the help of mobile phones like iPhones and HTC which allows u to access the internet to update anything you want, maybe it doesn't even have to take 10 minutes anymore. And if the content uploaded is anything phenomenon, it can generate millions of hits within a short frame of time too, meaning millions of people from all over the world have seen what you have just uploaded onto the world wide web, and so yes, that's how power the social media is now.

Social media is an efficient way to learn about the world's happenings and also help create and foster a new generation of liberal and independent people, who do not have to depend on the traditional means of media to get their news or insights. There are able to exercise their own critical thinking ability and can also express their opinions more interactively. Traditional forms of media usually go through some forms of censorship by the government or authority and many of the things or information people learned from it may be "fine tuned", hiding some kinds of truth from them. But social media is a little different, it is a participatory online media where news, photos, videos and podcast are made public via social media websites through voluntary submissions by people in the community and around the world. Unless it is anything overly serious, they will not face censorship or be taken off the web, and even by the time they are taken off the web, many people are online long and often enough to have already seen it.

In the past, people used to turn to tv or radio immediately whenever they hear of some major news. But these days, people are offered this other alternatives, which provides a broader option for them to learn about things. Social media offers a wider range of insights into things, and most importantly have more and faster updates on the various trending issues. These days, the consumers grow irritably impatient when traditional media do not provide us enough information at a fast enough speed, and increasingly there are more people just resorting to social media to feed their hunger. It is undeniable that many of us today are overly reliant on the social media today.