http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/business/media/03media.html?ref=technology
The article, “Turning to Social Networks for News” in the New York Times, discusses what we talked about for a while during ENG 102, how there has been a shift in where young adults get their news from television broadcasts to social media networks. The article describes the recent death of Osama Bin Laden and the drastic amount of people that were responding to the event through social media networks. It talks of three main ways how young adults are turning to social networks for their news. It said that word of Bin Laden’s death was being spread wildly through social media sites for twenty minutes before news broadcasters were able to report the news, which was a whole hour before Obama’s address from the White House. As shown with this recent news, Twitter and Facebook have become “early warning systems for breaking news.” According to the article, Twitter saw the highest sustained rate of posts, with about 3,440 per second in a time span of almost two hours. Also, Facebook saw more than five million mentions of Bin Laden in the United States alone. There was even a page created, named “Osama Bin Laden is Dead,” and by Monday there were 400,000 fans. Social media networks not only let people talk about the information they are receiving but also encourage people to absorb it and do things about it. For example, a sophomore at Georgetown saw an update from a friend about an announcement from Obama and word about Bin Laden’s death. He states, “…rather than just informing me, it spurred me into action; it put me in the shoes in a very real way of those people who use social media as a tool for political activism, for coordination and communication.” There were also uses of new technology, shared through social media networks, that allowed people to share their experiences. For example, users of Instagram, a photo-sharing application for the iPhone, allowed people to share photos of Obama speaking, American flags, and crowds gathered at several different universities as well as in New York and Washington. The final example of the importance of social networks to news was at the Mets-Phillies game on Sunday night. Billy Wichterman spoke of how during the eighth inning he heard a chanting of “U-S-A’s” He immediately turned to his iPhone to check Twitter and Facebook to figure out why they were chanting that.
These are all evidence that we are in fact moving towards social media sites as our news source. I can even admit that that’s how I found out about Osama bin Laden, through Facebook. After analyzing it a little, I think I have realized that we rely a lot on social media for the initial news, but then wait to hear the real facts about the subject from a news broadcaster on television or even an online paper. While in fact, we have shifted, we are not completely reliable on social media sites. This is good because while social media sites cover the same news, just in different ways, especially way faster, reliability is still a main issue.
