Comments on Essay 2

Johan Östberg talked about how one difference between social media and old media is that the old media has to think about reputation. If a newspaper should publish something that later turned out to be untrue they are in big trouble. Of course something that turns out to be false is very serious because it can affect the entire company or newspaper. But, does not a person writing something have a reputation to think about? I believe that the reputation-part holds true for social media as well. If you are acting weird on Facebook all of you friends will wonder what you are thinking about. Your reputation will probably change so that you are worse off. In a context where the things you write are connected to you as a person and a network of people can see what you do, I definitely believe that you will think about what you write. The systems that Slashdot, Wikipidea and others have created work in a similar way. Others can verify what you wrote and comment on your statements. In the same way Google uses links. If there are many links to your website the probability that it is good quality increases. I think that these instruments are a very good to increase the quality of the content produced by social media.

I would also like to comment on the anonymous essay with the title “The quality issue”. I agree that social media content actually can be a very good compliment to old media. Social media technologies allow us to create new content that old media could not cover in a broad sense. If we are going to plan our holiday trip to a place we never been to we want to know what hotel we should stay at. A newspaper ad might give us a clue and perhaps ads with testimonials will help us even more. However, a “real” customer, someone who actually writes good things about a hotel because he/she liked the hotel, can give us more objective information than a sponsored magazine. Customer-to-customer interactions can come alive on the Internet. Concerning the agenda that Johan Östberg was talking about, the reason for a single person to write in a forum about a hotel might not be the same as when a magazine writes about this hotel. However, as I wrote in my essay, the most important thing for the reader is to look at the content produced in the light of the context it is presented in. If a blogger has many readers companies might be interested in sponsoring this blog, and in those cases the blogger might not be more true to his/her real feelings than a magazine. But, if someone that you might know through a friend’s friend writes something good about a product you might get a very genuine opinion from that person.

By: Marie Martinson