When it comes to content quality, I am not a big ‘fan’ of social media content. I have encountered the problems of ‘reliability, traceability and measurability’ every now-and-then while collecting the information from internet. The quality of user-generated content varies drastically from excellent to abuse and spam. As the availability of such content increases, the task of identifying high-quality content in sites based on user contributions ‘social media sites’ becomes increasingly crucial. People providing information on these sites while being ‘anonymous’ makes me skeptical about the information’s transparency. Sony won the DVD format war by exploiting the opaque and untraceable social media to create conspiracies against HD-DVD.
While on the traditional mass media (TV and Newspaper) information cannot pass without the full reference to the informant. When you compare social media with traditional/mass media in terms of quality, I think the former falls short. Hiding the informant’s identity or publishing a fake one, taking away the reader’s right to know the source makes the quality standard fall drastically low.
Social media certainly have its benefits of fast search and enormous quantity of content, but unfortunately it is only qantitative but not qualititaive in my point of view. You can never be sure of which website will bring you spams and virus that will corrupt your windows. If not so, still you can not be sure how reliable is the information excluding content from some popular and well-known web sites. The enormity of information do you no good, rather it just add to the confusion and makes the process far hactic while scanning the 'rights-and-wrongs' of the content. On the other hand newspaper and televison has less content which can be traceable, far more transparent and the risk is negligibly low.
People will pay for information that is well-researched, objective, and skillfully crafted. Good journalism is hard work based on a solid tradition. It is an asset. Most people who read newspapers can discern between high-quality and mediocre content. That is why they buy newspaper and read it. Reporting, which is a full-time job, requires networks, resources, and relationships. Bloggers may try to adopt real reporting infrastructure, but many are far from the real thing.
This situation of unreliability is avoidable if you only follow some big names and get the content from there but then you have no benefit of the quantity of data available. Social media provides you with all sorts of information, open for all, download-able and cheap but it also offers risks and irritation of opaqueness.
1 comment:
I agree (to some point) that content on the web is not very reliable and traceable. But I would like to point out that there are different kinds of Social Media Technologies that are getting more and more reliable. I personally like Wikipedia because it gives me a fast and free encyclopedia at all time. I wouldn’t recommend using Wikipedia as a reference in major articles or thesis, but would consider it as a fast and easy way to learn about things that I’m otherwise quite unfamiliar with.
I also agree with you that traditional mass media contains more confirmed and tested information than the internet. But on the other hand, this mass media only contains information that someone else wants you to know about! And how practical is it to watch a Discovery documentary about astronomy at 2 o clock in the afternoon? Not really practical, is it? I would rather suggest a summation, or immersion, of these two Medias (a Youtube for documentaries, maybe) rather than only using one. The most noticeable and most remarkable feature with internet as a social media technology is the 24-7 presence of it. I think that the mass media haven’t really understood the benefits yet!
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