‘Social media is growing at an explosive rate, with millions of people
all over the world generating and sharing content on a scale barely imaginable
a few years ago’ (Asur et al. 2011, p. 434). The media ecosystem is emerging
under the pressure developing (Naughton 2006). New forms of communication among
society had evolved and new media publishing such as Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, Blogs, online news sources, and Instagram had emerged. Journalism,
advertising and marketing had altered due to new forms of social media.
These new forms of media now allow users to comment and interact with
each other online. Unlike print media which is based on one way communication. For
example, micro blogs are short comments usually delivered to a network of
associates. Jansen et al. (2009) described that micro blogging often referred
to as micro-sharing, micro-updating, or Twittering. This provides an electronic
word of mouth at a very low cost (Jansen et al. 2009).
Above picture showing how AirAsia used twitter as electronic word of
mouth to convey information to followers on twitter.
However, these new trends in online media publishing created privacy
issues. Users tend to give up personal information to join social networks and
disclosed all personal information (Barnes 2006). Some corporations and
institutions may require to monitor employee on company websites or on video
sharing to protect varied levels of privacy amid increasing public scrutiny
(Lange 2007). For example, a lost of $17 million was reported by the Canadian
Anti-Fraud Centre due to the online dating scams happened in 2012 (
CBC News2013).
(Source: http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/20/pf/online-dating-scam/index.html)
In short, the advantages that brought by the new form of media
publishing have transformed communication into a new media ecosystem. The
immediacy, unlimited capacity of publishing space online, the capacity for
interactivity of online media, and lastly the contextualize of news story by
making available resources have played a significant role in this
transformation process (Stuart 2006, p. 25-26).
Reference List
Asur,
S, Huberman, BA, Szabo, G & Wang, C 2011, ‘Trends in social media -
persistence and decay’, 5th
International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, pp. 434-437,
viewed 14 April 2013 <http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM11/paper/viewFile/2815/3205>.
Barnes,
SB 2006, ‘A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States’, First Monday, vol. 11, no. 9, viewed 14
April 2013 <http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/barnes/index.html>.
CBC
News 2013, Woman says online dating scam
cost her $42K,viewed 14 April 2013 <http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2013/03/15/quebec-laval-online-dating-site-scam.html>.
Jansen,
BJ, Zhang, M, Sobel, K & Chowdury, A 2009, ‘Twitter Power: Tweets as
Electronic Word of Mouth’, Journal of the
American Society for Information Science and Technology, vol. 60, issue 11,
pp. 2169-2188, viewed 14 April 2013 <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.ezlibproxy.unisa.edu.au/doi/10.1002/asi.21149/pdf>
Lange,
PG 2007, ‘Publicly Private and Privately Public: Social Networking on YouTube’,
Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, vol. 13, issue 1, pp. 361-380, viewed 14 April 2013 <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00400.x/pdf>.
Naughton,
J 2006, Blogging and The Emerging Media
Ecosystem, viewed 14 April 2013 <http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/b>.
Stuart,
A 2006, ‘Online News : Journalism and the Internet’, Open University Press, Buckingham, p. 23-26, viewed 14 April 2013
<http://site.ebrary.com/lib/unisaau/Doc?id=10196990&ppg=35>