[The City and the State of the School]
Introduction
It is undeniable that starting from the second half of 2000s the social networks have become one of the most popular means of communication between people allowing them to instantly share their ideas either among their friends and relatives or with broader communities, which can include inhabitants of their town, their country or even the whole world. Social media like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn became very popular in a short period of time. At the end of 2015 there were about 2 billion of active social media users monthly (Statista, 2016b). The most popular social network among these people is Facebook, which is used by nearly 1.6 billion active users per month (Statista, 2016a). It is anticipated that by 2019 there will be 2.72 billion active social media users, which is 36% more than at the present moment of time (Statista, 2016b).
New technologies allow to find any kind of information quicker, communicate with other people in a number of different ways and eventually make decisions faster than ever. However, traditional media still plays very important role in the society (Tyson, 2010, pp. 15-16). Throughout mid-2000s, some experts believed that the existing media system would be ruined and online sources would eventually become one and only method of information. Nevertheless, there was no big surprise that these concerns didn’t become reality due to the fact that each of media types has its pros and cons (Clapperton, 2013). Even traditional TV segment, which is supposed to be the first candidate to be substituted by online, is still popular. Recent survey by GlobalWebIndex showed that only 2% of television watchers prefer only online TV and don’t turn on their old TV sets any more (Young, 2016a), while 34% of the survey participants watch only traditional linear TV (Young, 2016b). All these facts prove that advantages of both social and traditional media needs to be thoroughly analyzed in order to understand which social groups prefer different media types as well as prospects of traditional and social media development.
Advantages of Social Media and Traditional Media
Social media as a new kind of media has numerous advantages. There are general advantages for all users of social media and for specific social groups like children as well as significant benefits for business users. The first and main argument in support of social media is its two-way method of communication. It allows numerous opportunities of taking into consideration the personality of customers, while old kinds of media are based on transmitting the same kind of information to millions of different people (Hausman, 2012). Social media also leads to strengthening of intercultural communications without borders, instill tolerance principles of behavior in people, which allow to freely communicate with people of different color of skin, different religion, different political views etc. (Parrack, 2012)
Talking about interpersonal connections, social media is a very handy tool of building local communities. Although it is much more common to discuss negative influence of social media on children and teenagers, there is also a variety of benefits for youngsters. Social media also gives opportunity to actively take part in life of local communities via activities like charity fundraising and volunteering (O'Keeffe, G. S., Clarke-Pearson, K. et al., 2011, p. 801). Some educational institutions even use blogs in order to develop children’s skills in creative texts writing (Borja, 2005).
Finally, social media is a powerful business tool allowing companies to deal with a wide range of tasks. One of the main advantages of social media for business users is certainly its cost and time effectiveness. New Internet technologies now allow business to measure effectiveness of its marketing activities almost in real time. All the useful features eventually give broader opportunities for understanding consumers’ behavior in general (Cisnero, 2014a). The measures mentioned above eventually lead to better brand awareness of the company.
Together with business problems, social networking has also drastically changed the world of politics. Social media became an important factor to consider before making any political decisions, both domestic and international. For instance, since the early 2000s social media have changed the usual flow of Presidential election campaigns. For example, thanks to social media, Barack Obama’s supporters could easier gather money essential for campaign and organize more effectively (O’Connor, 2012, pp. 19-20). Alongside with US politics, social media also played a crucial role during Arab Spring (O’Connor, 2012, pp. 3-4).
The most commonly mentioned reason of why traditional media is still in use is the fact that social media still doesn’t have 100% coverage of all the people on the planet Earth. This is especially important while communicating with elder age groups, who may not use the Internet services because they got used to traditional channels of communications like offline newspapers or television. Moreover, there are countries in the world, where the Internet itself is not available to the whole population (Rao, 2014). For instance, being at the first place by the number of Internet users, China has the Internet penetration rate of only 52.2%, which stands for about 661 million people having no access to the Web. Therefore, some countries are characterized with ongoing heavy influence of traditional media.
There are constant attempts of developing appropriate payment model for accessing the content of popular newspapers websites. However, there is still no universal recipe of the appropriate ways of paying for digital content. This fact is proved by the recent 2015 Reuters Institute survey, which revealed that though there is a clear trend of newspaper purchase decline all over the world, the payment rate for online media is still low. Only about 10% of newspapers readers are willing to pay extra money for additional content provided online. Reportedly, the number of people paying for digital content hasn’t grown since 2014 (Reuters Institute, 2015a; Reuters Institute, 2015b).
Unlike social media, the traditional newspapers and TV news reports are more credible sources of information. For instance, right after Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 citizen journalists connected to police scanners via their radios and then claimed in social networks that they identified the guilty person as Sunil Tripathi, missing student of Brown University. This eventually became a vivid example of disinformation distributed via social media. Journalists found out, where Tripathi’s family lived and went right there in order to get answers on the questions interesting them. However, some hours later, Tsarnaev brothers were identified as real bombers. The reason of this terrible mistake was that one of the people listening to the radio misheard the suspected person’s last name. This showed the negative side of social media allowing to quickly exchange information without having obligation to prove it (Madrigal, 2013). It is important to notice that in this sense social media follows the principles, on which Wikipedia projects are based. The emerge of Wikipedia was also first met with enthusiasm. However, “democratic” nature of Wikipedia then revealed its negative side. Wikipedia content is often unstable and can be changed any moment (Denning, P, et al., 2015, p. 186).
Social media is often perceived as a truly democratic mean of communication between people. However, this is not always true mainly to the fact that social networks business models are based on the idea of selling the opportunity to deliver the information and advertisement provided by the businesses to the targeted groups of users. There are slight differences in business models of different social networks, but nevertheless all of them have advertising as the main income source (Albarran, 2013, p. 76). In this sense the phenomenon of citizen journalism is a part of this concept. People are encouraged to collect, analyze and publish actual pieces of information in order to develop a reputation of trusted sources. This again affects the credibility of information published on social media sited in the negative way (Samuels and Turner, 2015).
One more important advantage of traditional media comparing to social media paradoxically comes from its conservative nature. Though both new and traditional kinds of media provide entertainment and “serious information” content, newspapers, television, radio and other traditional types of media are more oriented on presenting objective information than their social media competitors. This is one more argument in favor of traditional media trustworthiness, which still allows them to survive despite heavy influence of social media on people (Nguyen & Western, 2006). Despite heavy social media usage, people tend to use traditional media in order to get reliable information according to a number of researches. In this situation, social media becomes a functional news aggregator and the place to share opinions, while traditional media remains the most credible information source (Pew Research Center, 2013). On the contrary, it must be said that quality of information received through any kind of communication channel first of all depends on the general educational and cultural level of a reader and his ability to gather and analyze information.
Conclusion
Therefore, it becomes clear that there’s no ideal kind of media, which would be perfect for all situations. Both social and traditional media have their pros and cons. It seems reasonable to attempt combining both technologies while providing people with essential information. For instance, traditional media can be used in order to encourage people to get acquainted with social media benefits. In order to attract more people to social networks, the stories depicting them should start in offline media, but finish online and thus allow people see everything in action and to work out their own opinion on the social media services.
The movement in opposite direction (attracting online users to offline media) also looks very reasonable. It is obvious that message from online distributed via offline media becomes louder and attracts much more attention to it. Therefore, it can become a noticeable contribution in the process of building trustful relations between news broadcasters and their readers.
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