(BGF) – Social media are thought to be systems where people create and receive information, and will prevail in the future. And yet, we have seen amazing examples of “nobodies” becoming “somebodies” overnight, and a piece of information can be retweeted million times, or shared to hundreds of people.
The Question is “Will the social media provide democratization of information?” John Wihbey, the managing editor of the Journalist’s Resource conducted a research to reveal the truth of democratization of the social media.
Click here to read the full paper.
From the Introduction:
Our digitally networked world fuels the dream of the democratization of thought, ideas and flows of information.
Huge networks underpin the dream. Facebook boasts more than a billion users, Twitter has a quarter-billion. The Sina Weibo microblogging platform in China sees nearly 150 million users a month.
Given that Facebook was founded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, the era of social media is still in its infancy. There are parallels to the periods immediately following the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in the 19th century, when the full impact of those inventions was not yet clear.
Because of the Web, we have seen amazing examples of “nobodies” becoming “somebodies” overnight, of whiplash-fast events arising in previously obscure corners of the world. We witness instances of super-empowered citizens, viral phenomena, and the seemingly instant coordination of protests and celebrations alike. Memes and hashtags zip and proliferate.
These are the relative “successes” of the digital age; high-profile instances of a democratizing system are frequently the points of emphasis when we talk about the rise of the Web. We seldom discuss the failures and what, on balance, has not changed. But there has been a simmering counter-narrative, one articulated mostly in academic circles and largely ignored in popular discourse. Worries have been mounting for some time about the online world’s capacity to change traditional dynamics of access and inequality around news and information.
Read the full paper (PDF).