After learning about Twitter, I was skeptical of its use. I wondered, why did people need to constantly let others know what they were doing at any given moment? The whole idea seemed very self-involved. Reluctantly, I joined Twitter and began choose a list of people to "follow."
After navigating through the site for awhile, the reason for the popularity of Twitter became clear. Twitter is not merely an online diary of sorts, but a mode of mass communication and idea exchange.
In a recent article, Brian Solis discusses how social media is not only changing the meaning of journalism, but of journalists themselves. Tweeting from the courtroom or the ball game humanizes journalists. Instead of delivering information through a formal medium, journalists can disseminate quick facts through channels available to anyone with access to a computer and the Internet.
In a class I took a few semesters ago called "Rhetoric, Politics, and Mass Media," my professor defined mass media as, "Individuals or institutions who use technological means to communicate biased information to large numbers of people who have little to no immediate feedback channels." After thinking it over, I agreed with the definition. With traditional media, the only feedback a person has is to call a news station or write a letter to the editor of a newspaper. These methods are hardly immediate. Social media sites such as Twitter allow people to instantly respond to a news update or story posting.
This type of journalism is preferable because it serves exactly who it is supposed to serve - the people. Furthermore, the more people who are involved in the news reporting process and the more people who exchange differing ideas, the more democratic the process becomes. This should be something to celebrate, for isn't it the purpose of journalism in the first place?
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