Social Media’s Effects on Modern Information Processing

1468 Words3 Pages

The introduction of social media into the world of information represents a massive shift on the landscape of information processing. Social media promises what industrial media can’t: a public voice, not just for experts, but for everyone. I believe that social media has made three important changes to the way humans handle information. First, it has changed who produces the world’s information. Second, it has changed the process by which information is formed. Finally, it has actively encouraged the creation of highly dynamic and fluid information.

Common to all forms of social media is the notion of consumer generated media. Since social media is defined as a form of communication (a medium over which information can be transferred), I see social media as the means by which information (in this case, consumer generated content) can be delivered.

In this paper I intend to focus on three areas of information that social media has affected: personal communication, news broadcasting, and advertising.

Social media sites have completely reformed the way humans share and create information on an interpersonal level. The most prominent example of this change brought about by social media is, by far, the social networking giant known as Facebook. Facebook did to all forms of modern personal communication what the telegraph did to snail-mail: it revolutionized the way humans shared information. Facebook is quickly replacing the telephone, internet forums, and even e-mail as the new information medium of choice for casual/non-professional information exchange. No longer do you need to buy a domain name, website hosting provider, and learn how to write html code to share your thoughts on the web. All you have to do is type your name an...

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...several orders of magnitude greater than all of the shifts in information processing preceding it. With every individual equipped with a newly found voice (or at least a louder one), information is being created, shared and manipulated at a greater rate than ever before. We’re not just observing; we’re authoring and judging too.

Works Cited

Acquisti, Alessandro, and Ralph Gross. “Predicting Social Security numbers from public data.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106.27 (2009): 10975 -10980. Web. 23 Oct. 2011.

Brenhouse, Hillary. “Osama bin Laden Death on Twitter: Man Live-Tweets Killing - TIME NewsFeed.” TIME NewsFeed. 2 May 2011. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.

Papacharissi, Zizi. “The virtual geographies of social networks: a comparative analysis of Facebook, LinkedIn and ASmallWorld.” New Media & Society 11.1-2 (February): 199 -220. Web. 27 Oct. 2011.

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