Social Media Is More Important Than Traditional Media for Spreading News

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I think you must have using one of them. China daily, Macau daily, Apple daily. I’m not sure if you read it every day. Repaid Internet development as largely changed our lives. Social media has become an important part of our daily life. What is social media? There is not a clear definition of this word. But as we know, social media just like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace can give us an online socializing platform to get the real-time information, share our wonderful idea and fantasy think or to exchange our own information. We can define the word ‘Social Media’ as ‘Web 2.0 and User Generated Content’. That, is ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content’ (Andreas & Michael, 2009). Social media is going to replace traditional media gradually. You can see a lot of traditional media even have their page in the social media.In this moment, one question would be considered, whether the social media is more important than the traditional media. For this question, in my opinion, it is correct to say social media is more important than traditional media. Although the social media have caused some inevitable problems, we still can’t deny the advantage of it. There are three point that prove social media is more important than traditional media for spreading news.

One of the most important advantage is that social media than traditional media is more availability and direction. The availability means that social media has a better availability of flowing information. (Bailey ,2015). The same news, social media allow instant news release, and the traditional media must wait for printing. The newspaper was reporting news that happened on the previous day, but social media showed some news that may happened few minutes before. The advantage of propagation velocity is everyone can use the Internet to access or spread of the information anytime and anywhere. News can be more rapidly through social media. And the traditional media need more time to layout, print and copy again. Here is an example that support this. On July 23nd (Beijing time), a big accident of motor train happened. Weibo, one of the biggest social media in mainland China made vital difference.  At that time there was a photographer, weibo named "Lucy" heard near had a serious accident, hurried to the scene. At the first time on weibo posted the latest  and fastest news to tell net friends,  Half an hour later, the news was reproduced more than 20000 times, the article comments is close to 8000. He stayed there long time and continued to post the lasted news, even though he is not a reporter. After the accident, many children lost touch with their family. He used weibo to help the children to find their parents, and finally succeeded (Qian,2011). This once again shows that the spread of social media rapidly.

In the past, people only listen the radio or watch TV to get the news, even buy  newspapers and magazines. But now,  it's easy to watch the news in the social media. Such as Facebook, twitter, we chat etc. In cost effective point of view, social media is more advantage than traditional media. By contrast, people know a news, even if have comments on the news that they only can tell friends or families in the past, not a platform to communicate ideas. Now the social media, we can tell other people about own views and opinions to comments of right and wrong anytime and anywhere. The passage of time, while we know that social media is convenient and quick, there have been some cybercrime, attack or cyberbullying. The reason is that there is not a formal system or department dedicated to control or to crack down on Internet crime and bullying. And often the people who are attacked or do the attacking  are teenagers, because they think that no matter do what they say or do, they will not be punished.  This leads to rising network crime or cyberbullying nowadays. (Sameer&Justin,2010). So, social media is always two sides to everything, there is a good platform to communicate, has brought the serious cyberbullying.

Maybe, someone will say that traditional media is more professional and formal. Because social media  led to the news difficult to verify the reliability. On the one side, the social media can easily to collect the news all around the world and spread it as well. people can get a lot of news from the website as well as post on it, but there is a disadvantages of social media, it is not entirely credible, because anyone can post news on it and no one can make sure that, most of the people doubt the veridicality of news which are form the social media, traditional media have a system to find news and confirm, that is the mainly advantage of traditional media. On the other hand, according to survey data from the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer search engines (read: Google) have overtaken traditional media as the most trusted source of news globe (Greg Sterling, 2015). Hybrid media follows traditional media, which in turn is followed by social in the Edelman trust hierarchy.  Here “hybrid media” is defined as media sites or blogs that are fundamentally digital but which may aggregate and curate traditional news sources. Examples include Flipboard, TechMeme, Politico and Search Engine Land(Greg Sterling, 2015).