Selva's Blog

Social media is one of those new terms that has kept most people in a state of query until they are “shown” what it is and they say “ahhh.” Many people I have spoken to often say,”I  did not know what social media was until a friend pointed out that I am actually using it and doing it. I just didn’t know that there is a term for it already. To people,who also did not know, here’s a simple enough explanation.

Social media is the newest kind of way that we present and pass along information. It used to be the newspaper, where people found out about the latest information and news about the world. We called newspapers, the print media. Then came the radio and then the television, which we called broadcast media. Now, we get information from another source, from the internet. But hey, don’t get confused. Social media does not refer to internet news sites. They are part of what is called the online media.

Social media refer to the information that we get from other people.

We get them from their blog posts, like what I am writing right now. We get them from the status that we post on our facebook and twitter accounts. We get them from videos that we contribute to websites as citizen journalists. These are information and news that are passed along and communicated through social interaction. This is what social media is all about: interaction. It democratizes media and puts the power to give news from the hands of a couple to the hands of the many or communities.

You may have already heard of the word social media but for the life of you, you just can’t figure out what social media is. Social media refers to the method or medium of transferring information from one person to another through social interaction.This is pretty broad, in my opinion, because virtually everything that we do can be deemed social interaction. So although most people would attribute social media to the use of the internet to express how we feel about certain issues— through blog articles, twitter updates and facebook statuses,  blog posts and forum posts and even this post I am just writing— many still maintain that social media is not really all that new.

In fact, according to some media experts, social media has actually been present for decades now. We are just not aware that it is. For instance, public speaking and demonstrations are said to be forms of social media. The same goes with slogans that are used in rallies. Even street preaching and person to person marketing which are often used to market credit cards are also forms of social media. And maybe they are right in defining what they believe social media is. After all, when you really look into its definition, anything can constitute social interaction. And admit it, those mentioned above do transfer information through a form of social interaction.

But for me, whether or not it has been around for decades or just years is not really the issue. The issue is whether it is the future of news media. People have increasingly relied on social media for their information and sometimes even news stories. I think this is what people should be debating on.