The Power of Social Media

It comes to no surprise that most of my peers today no longer seek news updates from newspapers. The first thing that we normally do in the morning after waking up; open our laptop/ PC/ smart phone to check on social networking sites for any interesting updates. Inevitably, social media has become part of our daily lives. Personally, my daily social interaction is inseparable from Facebook and Twitter. The two social networking sites are on constant check throughout the day to keep myself updated with the latest happenings around.

New media, as defined by Chun and Keenan (2006), is “an interactive medium or form of distribution as independent as the information it relayed.” The difference between new media and old or traditional media lies on the presentation of the content it presents, in which new media has it all digitized. Digitality, interactivity, hypertextuality, dispersal and virtuality are the qualities of new media (Lister et al 2003).

Today, we live in a globalized world with new media as a major part of it. Aligned with the earlier statement, Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) mentioned that most documents today incorporate a mixture of text, images and other graphic or sound elements. In today’s era of globalization, we can use various modes of communication to deliver messages to others. Walsh (2006) added that readers utilize their senses; sight, hearing, tactile, kinaesthetic in interpreting multimodal texts.

It came to realization of how powerful social media in disseminating information when the recent Tsunami disaster hit Japan earlier this year. Within few hours of the occurrence, news about the destruction spread like a wildfire on various social networking sites (Benkoil 2011). Twitter users all across the globe filled the timeline of the micro-blogging site by sharing reports, concerns and prayers through their tweets. The hash tags used in Tsunami-related tweets such as, #prayforjapan, #Tsunami, Sendai, NHK World, Tokyo Disneyland became Trending Topics on Twitter for several consequent days since the disaster occurrence (Magnier 2011).

Social media has indeed allowed people all over the world to access immediate news updates about the disaster. With all the interactive contents provided; raw pictures and footages of the affected victims and places, social media brought more depth in reporting that brings the audience’s experience to a whole new level.

In Malaysian context, most major newspapers have embarked on social media as well. Take The Star as an example. Aside from the print version, the Malaysia’s number 1 English newspaper has an online site (http://thestar.com.my) that is constantly updated with latest news reports along with interactive pictures and video clips. The Star has a twitter account (twitter.com/staronline) for those mobile users who would like to access their news conveniently from their smart phones.

References:

Benkoil, D 2011, How Social Media, Internet Changed Experience of Japan Disaster, Media Shift, viewed 8^th June 2011, <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/03/how-social-media-internet-changed-experience-of-japan-disaster-074.html>

Chun, WHK and Keenan, T 2006, New Media Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, Routledge, London.

Kress, G and van Leeuwen, T 2006, ‘The semiotic landscape: language and visual communication’, Reading Images,pg.16-44.

Lister, M, Dovey, J, Giddings, S, Grant, I and Kelly, K 2003, New Media: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, London.

Magnier, M 2011, Twitter response to Japan earthquake, tsunami is fast widespread, Los Angeles Times, viewed 8^thJune 2011, <http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/11/world/la-fg-japan-quake-twitter-20110312>

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol.29, no.1, pg.24-37.

New Media, Political Crisis and Democracy.

I can still clearly recall about two years ago, a fire incident took place in my previous campus. There was no injured victim or serious damage caused by the misfortune. Interestingly, merely few hours after the occurrence, a senior of mine posted a video recording of the fire evacuation process on his YouTube account. It was very efficient of him to post the raw footage up to the video sharing site almost immediately after the actual event happened. This would not have been possible without the existence of new media. From the perspective of a media student, his act of capturing the event and sharing it as a piece of information is considered as a form of citizen journalism.

It is no doubt that the emergence of citizen journalism sprouted from new media. Glaser (2006) explained the term ‘citizen journalism’ as a form of reporting by individuals with no professional journalism training, who utilize modern technologies and Internet as their tools to disseminate information. The reporting can come in forms of blogs, pictures, pod casts and videos; basically, new media.

New media has been proven to play a significant role in contributing to political shift in the Middle East countries. Many street protesters recorded the anti-government rallies and uploaded them to social networking and video sharing websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for the rest of the world to see. These amateur footages were also aired in Al-Jazeera and gained worldwide attention on the political issues in the Middle East. The abdication of Egypt’s president, Mubarak would have never happened without the help of Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube, as expressed by Wael Ghonim, Google executive and cyberactivist, who is also a supporter of anti-government protests in Egypt (Relaxnews 2011).

Internet allows information to be disseminated interactively to individuals across the globe with no hierarchical and geographical boundaries. With these characteristics, Internet has the power to dissolve political control. Internet provides access to social networking sites that act as a platform for individuals to interact with each other to identify and discuss societal issues, and make a change to political situation; also known as public sphere (Habermas 1991). Raboy and Dagenais (1992) added by stating that media act as agents of social communication by which a crisis is made public, and the media-crisis relationship is the key factor in the struggle for democracy. Internet is undoubtedly a major contributor in supporting democracy in political practice.

In local context, alternative media namely, MalaysiaKini and Malaysian Insider serve as platforms for Malaysian citizens to champion freedom of speech and encourage the society to be vocal in expressing their opinions on political matters.

References:

Raboy, M and Dagenais, B 1992, Media, Crisis And Democracy: Mass Communication and the Disruption of Social Order, SAGE Publications, London.

Relaxnews 2011, Social media, cellphone video fuel Arab protests, viewed 8^th June 2011, <http://techcentral.my/news/story.aspx?file=/2011/2/28/it_news/20110228100840&sec=it_news>

Habermas, J 1991, The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Buroeis Society, MIT Press, United States, viewed 8^th June 2011, <http://books.google.com/books?id=e799caakIWoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false>

Glaser, M 2006, Your Guide to Citizen Journalism, Media Shift, viewed 8^th June 2011, <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/09/your-guide-to-citizen-journalism270.html>