Internet : Media intrusion into social networking sites

Media intrusion into social networking sites

With the much increasing popularity of Facebook and Twitter, media persons from many countries across the world started to gather in crowds in the public and social platforms in the Internet. Before this, the media houses had their websites, but most of them didn’t have blogs. Now, many of the journos have blogs, but there they don’t produce quality articles which are worthy of any debate. Some columnists do write and invite debate, but rarely do they reply to user comments. But the case is different in Twitter.

In Twitter, noted journalists who think they’re popular, interact with some users, get some tweets and feature in television coverage during a talk show or a national debate. All these were missing earlier, but is this because there was no Twitter in the past? Cannot be so! Because, the media houses hired efficient IT guys to maintain their online identities. If they so wished, they could have easily interacted with users when there was no Twitter or Facebook.

The real reason for journalists to gather in large numbers in the social networking sites is, the huge population of general public which has turned up in social networking sites and the media guys cannot ignore this huge population of Facebook & Twitter members. The media guys found out that they’ll definitely miss out their share of popularity if they remain absent from these sites where there are large number of people. Radio & Television were the biggest means of public broadcasting, the media had it in their grip for decades. But now, as the barriers have broken and blogs, facebooks and twitters have emerged, media could not stay away for longer. Public was taking control of the media world in the Internet, how could the journalists let it happen like this? They thought they’re the emperors, nobody else should take away a share of their identity. Citizen journalists were emerging, Twitter & Facebook often began to spread breaking news even before the media could get hold of that news.

This was a major earthquake in the media houses, how can someone who’s an expert let the general public hijack a part of their job profile? Hence, media persons flocked in social networking sites, started interacting, they used their channels to publicize their FB/Twitter identities and thus tried to grab attention of public towards themselves. If there’s a piece of breaking news, they let other members to tweet to them so that they’ll start off with that piece of info. Thus it became a question of existence for the media if they stayed out of social networking.

This reveals the crowd power. Truly. Nobody can ignore it. The journalists who were till so long aren’t the only journalists in the world anymore, there emerged more. Now, branded media knows there’s unbranded media whose powerfulness cannot be overruled anymore.

Long Live the Internet!