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Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA: WHY BROADCASTING IS OBSOLETE
Social Media: Why Broadcasting Is Obsolete
Kris Haamer
Baltic Film and Media School
English Composition II
Professor Thurlow
June 14, 2008
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Social Media: Why Broadcasting Is Obsolete
Broadcast media have in recent years increasingly been criticized for a perceived decrease in
the quality of information they provide, broadcast tabloidization, irrelevance, and more generally for
the concentration of ownership (Bromley, 2001, p. 2). However there are more optimistic alternative
models (Goh & Foo, 2007, p. 137) with implications towards better quality information and an
increasingly meaningful discourse accessible to more and more people. These views could be broadly
described as being in the realm of social media, and generally advocate using technical innovations
such as the Internet to engage people in a more transparent conversation. As a superior model of
communication, social media will increase mediation quality and lead to benefits in several areas
over the traditional broadcasting model.
Failures of the Broadcast Media
Concerns about the media, and media criticism is not new in the literature. As early as 1920,
Lippmann, writing about the powers and failures of the press in his book Liberty and the News,
delivered the notion that “the news columns are common carriers. When those who control them
[...] determine by their own consciences what shall be reported and for what purpose, democracy is
unworkable. Public opinion is blockaded” (pp. 5‐6). More recently, Baudrillard, one of the most
fervent media critics of the century, with more eloquence described the prevalent media model as
"speech without response" (1981, p. 172).
Contemporary media cannot be viewed separately from technology; to a great degree it is
and has been dependent on technological advances. Because broadcasting media models by the
nature of their technology are dependent on some form of one‐to‐many or few‐to‐many
communication, Baudrillard is right to criticize the media on the grounds that “they fabricate
noncommunication” (p. 210) as this is indeed a technical given. However, when working with
MacLean, in his later works in 1985, Baudrillard further expanded his critique on the lack of
conversation in which he perhaps better described the downfalls of the contemporary media by
stating that the “present architecture of the media is founded on this […] definition: they are what
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finally forbids response, what renders impossible any process of exchange” (1985, p. 577). This lack
of possibility for conversation is why the broadcast model is obsolete.
Social media models on the other hand are less determined and allow for more flexibility. In
2008, for the most part they include highly technological implementations of mediation on the
Internet platform with considerable participatory aspects. These are sites on the Internet where
essentially every person becomes the media. The discussion over broadcast media seems to follow
from the types of questions Baudrillard poses “what else do the media dream of besides creating the
event simply by their presence?” (1994, p. 38), in which the media are seen as something large and
unusual that by the sole virtue of its presents creates illusions that fool the public. The discussion in
the realm of social media however, is more progressive. In essence, where everyone becomes the
media, being mediated is very commonplace for each person, and the effects of being mediated
could be anticipated to be less pronounced.
While according to some authors, for example Rheingold, the contemporary institutions of
the “mass media [...] have “commoditized” the public sphere, substituting slick public relations for
genuine debate” (2000, p. 29), social media implementations can be expected to have intrinsically a
greater degree of transparency. Because they are created by the people their existence depends on
people actively participating. Effectively, the social media version of the public sphere is controlled
by the people to a much greater degree, than the broadcasting version of the sphere. Therefore the
scope for access anywhere and for anyone for any need across devices and platforms, and even
independent of location, is that much greater for social media than for broadcasting media.
The virtue of giving more power to the people is why from a political perspective social
media is more democratic. Following from the premise that media set the political agenda, more
accurate information, transparency and participation in this process of every conversation benefits
everyone. Moreover, from a psychological viewpoint, research suggests that it is more natural for
people to discuss information socially on the Internet, rather than to passively consume media
created by broadcasters; according to a recent Morgan Stanley report more than half of the top 10
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Internet sites by usage are social, and the usage of television is declining (Morgan Stanley, 2008, pp.
8‐12).
Broadcast of Socialize?
Some of the benefits of social media are self‐evident. One recent example was the Chinese
earthquake in the Sichuan province on May 12, 2008. The news was broken not on mainstream
media but reportedly (Bradshaw) by local Chinese in the earthquake zone, on Twitter1, a social
networking site that lets people post short messages. In the Twitter realm everyone is a broadcaster.
Because the social nature of Twitter and with the help of machine translation, the news reached
people around the world before global broadcast media was able to take up the story, and much
before Estonian broadcast media was able to copy the story from the global media.
By referring to such examples (as there have been other similar cases that have taken place
around the world), one can think of the social media model as a combination of media and social
relations. Because news creators are accessible through email, chat applications, and their social
networking profiles, it becomes easier to ask any questions and get instant feedback. While this was
possible in newspapers trough mail‐in letters, the barriers of entry are greatly reduced trough the
speed of communication, and high visibility of the news creator. People can interact directly with the
news broadcaster on the ground trough services such as Skype and Facebook2; the latter also
provides a profile for the person so what one is saying can be qualified against previous experience
and commentary.
Social media is possible because the communication platform used – the Internet – is
technologically superior to broadcasting in the area communication. But furthermore, in the areas of
media economy, while the broadcast media economics rely on imprecise evaluations to provide the
audience numbers to the advertisers, social media implementations can make use of their high
technological base and the virtues of the Internet to produce detailed and accurate information for
1 For a further explanation of the Twitter service, please see twitter.com 2 For an explanation of Skype, see about.skype.com, for Facebook, please go to facebook.com
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the use of the advertisers. The nature of the conversation and actions of the participants allow
advertisers to offer their goods and services at the right time, and taking into account personal
preferences. This degree of precision creates trust for the advertisers to place more money into the
media. Moreover, as the Twitter example illustrates, the bulk of the job of producing journalism can
be done by usual people, cutting down on production costs.
In addition to economical benefits, the speedy and precise analysis of media content made
possible by computer technology can be utilized for other benefits as important, but perhaps less
apparent at the first glance. Having precise statistics helps people visualize their communication
streams, and as a part of those information streams news can be increasingly accurate. To take one
example, the News Station3 website which is a trend leader in the social media space in Estonia
produces streams of analytical data for each news item it indexes from broadcast news providers as
well as independent producers such as blogs. The site provides statistics about many measurable
aspects of news such as locations, organizations and people mentioned in the news content, and
their popularity in media.
As in News Station, other websites in the social media realm will be able to analyze the
media and produce story timelines which provide a live visualization of how the story is being
created. For example, one could see a press release being released, the coverage being written by a
certain person at Postimees, and the coverage being written by a certain person at Äripäev, charted
in order of appearance; one could contact those people. One could see live the other stories being
spawned in response, as well as opinions being created in the blogosphere.
There are clear benefits to such and open approach. Clear visibility of connections between
newsmakers, news creators, and other players in the story would make it increasingly difficult for
partial interests and public relations to control the environment and pass constructed news. Clearly
identified personalities would increase public recognition of newsmakers. Easy access to
3 Please see news.station.ee for further information, available in Estonian only
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newsmakers’ personal opinion in media such as blogs, and other news involving that person, and
commentary would allow people to understand “the story behind the story”.
Furthermore, clearly identified locations would emphasize the aspects particular to the place
of the news, while still retaining global availability. While News Station is already providing
geographic visualizations, taking this technology to mainstream would create emotional connections
and involve people in the news to a higher degree than plain text publications. One would
understand how specific regions in the country are covered. For example, the statistics of whether
news stories conglomerate more often around bigger center such as Tallinn and Tartu, and to what
extent smaller places are covered – would become clearly visible. Combined with location aware
devices such as the iPhone, social media would allow people to access news relevant to their
location. Whether this is information about a traffic jam on the next intersection or a notice of the
party that will take place in the club one is driving past, will depend on one’s personal preferences.
By using all these technologies in an open manner, social media can in effect provide the
type of information that used to be the domain of government or media statistics bureaus.
Combined with speed and ease of access, social media at the disposal of every consumer at every
moment to make decision about the content of their communications might have considerable
impacts. By that token, it is the ability of media to create open spaces for people to discuss, and the
ability to provide the tools for discussion, that qualify the quality of media in the social media realm.
Such open spaces for conversation and computer technologies help people to increase the
quality of the media they themselves produce and consume. People put news into context by tagging
the information with keywords and by such actions make that piece of information more complete
for other people. Moreover, to an extent at the current state of development, but increasingly in the
future, the technique allows computers to have a better programmatic understanding of the content.
The ideas of the Semantic Web (W3) that tie in with the social media model explore how information
in these open spaces can be queried and mashed up in different complex ways to produce added
value .
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For example, emerging Silicon Valley technology startups such as Freebase and Powerset4 use
a combination of social participation by the people and computer algorithms to allow users to ask
complex questions the like of “What were the names of Karl Marx's children?” and allow the user to
get a clear listing with names “Laura Marx, Eleanor Marx, Jenny Longuet” (Powerset) and pictures.
Powerset can be accessed over an iPhone, which in essence makes the information portable.
Because of the idea of information portability the social media model has no prerequisites
for prominent television channels such as the BBC or prominent newspapers such as the New York
Times to be the premiere destination because they have the means to broadcast content; on the
contrary, conversation can take place across different channels independent of their size and wealth.
In simple terms this means that conversation is not restricted to Postimees, Äripäev, TV3, or any
other channel; the comments one makes at Postimees become accessible trough Äripäev, TV3, and
vice versa. The conversation does not necessarily have to be fragmented and discontinuous with
each camp claiming its territory.
Conclusions
Today people around the world are increasingly likely to be actively participating in the
conversation on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter; instead of passively consuming the
news. In 2008, Facebook passed the 100 million user mark (Morgan Stanley, p. 10); if it were a
country, it would be the 12th by population size. Trough sites like these, and trough social media in
general people become part of the conversation because they are not secluded; the conversation is
portable and accessible by everyone and everywhere. “The ability of anyone to make the news will
give new voice to people who’ve felt voiceless—and whose words we need to hear. They are
showing all of us—citizen, journalist, newsmaker—new ways of talking, of learning” (Gillmor, p. 12).
Social media technologies create possibilities for increased public understanding what is
happening in their societies. Around the world services such as Twitter allow faster communication
4 For an explanation about services provided by Freebase and Powerset, see freebase.com/help and
powerset.com/about respectively
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of news content and commentary. Some institutions have taken note of these possibilities; the UK
government uses Twitter to have a conversation with citizens. In Estonia, the News Station website is
revolutionizing how media can be contextualized and analyzed. And the Estonian Foreign Ministry
uses Second Life to communicate with its virtual tenants. In all examples social media models bring
benefits over their broadcast counterparts, and the expectation is that they increase media literacy
by providing a better understanding of the connections between players on the media landscape.
While the ideas around social media models may be immature and in development, they are
actively being experimented with, and as the various services mentioned demonstrate, there are
several measurable qualitative benefits that the social media model brings to the forefront of the
discussion. While there may be criticisms, one can remember what the media visionary Marshall
McLuhan once said “the student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period
whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who have acquired the patterns of earlier media,
whatever they may happen to be” (McLuhan, p. 216)
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Works Cited
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Baudrillard, J., & Levin, C. (1981). For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. New York: Telos
Press Publishing.
Baudrillard, J., & Maclean, M. (1985). The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media. New
Literary History , 577‐589.
Bradshaw, P. (n.d.). OJB. Retrieved June 12, 2008, from
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2008/05/12/twitter‐and‐the‐chinese‐earthquake/
Bromley, M. (2001). No News is Bad News: Radio, Television, and the Public. New York: Pearson
Education.
Gillmor, D. (2004). We The Media. New York: O'Reilly .
Goh, D., & Foo, S. (2007). Social Information Retrieval Systems: Emerging Technologies and
Applications. Philadelphia: Idea Group Inc.
Lipmann, W. (2007). Liberty and the News. New York: Princeton University Press.
McLuhan, M. (2001). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Routledge Press.
Morgan Stanley. (2008). Internet Trends. New York: Morgan Stanley.
Powerset. (n.d.). Retrieved June 13, 2008, from http://www.powerset.com/explore/go/What‐were‐
the‐names‐of‐Karl‐Marx's‐children%3F
Rheingold, H. (2000). The Virtual Community. Cambridge: MIT Press.
W3. (2008, June 10). W3C Semantic Web Activity. Retrieved June 14, 2008, from
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/