Blogs, forums and online-newspapers are all new media technologies through which people can access the latest news. Though these are different ways to access this kind of information, they are quite different in quality. By visiting a blog you often get the personal opinion of one person, a forum gives you the summarized opinion of a larger number of people and online-newspaper often represent the news and opinion of the original paper. Depending on what kind of information you are looking for, these diverse social media technologies can help you in different ways.
As mentioned, blogs often give you the personal opinion of one person. So, if I wanted to know what Anders Svensson thinks about the new iPhone, I could visit his blog and get his opinion. If I rather wanted to know how the general opinion about this new phone is I would rather visit a forum about the phone and get a more general view. The reviews of iPhone in newspapers (both online and offline) would, in my opinion, be too impressive and exciting. This because mass media is often influenced by advertisers and big companies- This can create a conflict of interest and that is why I rather search for information in different forums than just trust the newspapers. Well, you could argument that forums may also contain “company users”, but I believe that if a lot of people in different forums agree on one opinion then that opinion has a higher probability of being true compared to something written in a well known newspaper.
As can be noticed, I would rather trust blogs and forums than newspapers. Even though the quality isn’t quite as good and the language not as clean, it is easier to get a person’s general view about a certain thing through blogs and forums.
Nowadays as blogs are getting more and more commercialized, I am becoming more and more uncertain about the writers opinion. You can quite often find technical blogs that are sponsored by some big company and can thus not write anything bad about their products. In my opinion there should be some kind of rating system for how independent a blog is. Considering today’s commercialization of the internet, I believe that this is necessary. It is not only the quality of the information that matters but also the independency and reliability that makes me believe in what I am reading.
How would you feel if you read an article about how bad KTH is while seeing a Chalmers banner at the side?
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5 comments:
Aftering reading your thoughts about new media and tranditional media, i sort of gain your attitude towards them and that's new media techniques are much better than tranditional ones because they are more independent from commercial purpose.I don’t know whether i understand right but from my perspective,these two main categories function differently in our life.
Tranditional media tools are more used to introduce new products or brands to its customers so they are usually informative. People don’t like commercials or ads mostly because they appear again and again rather than people dislike the ads itself. Blogs, Forums,etc. This kind of new media techoniques is usually personal and specific,as you said. They are the second voices to customers besides the producers. The authors of Forums or Blogs are usually the first group of attempters who already tried to use the products after attracted by ads. In that case, they can tell you what else you need to know besides the words on commercials.
In addition, i think we can not simply say which kind of media is more suitable for today’s sociaty because even thought the network is much more independent but many of them are lack of criterion.
I agree that quality is defined by the medium, in which opinions are stated, and that mass media can be influence by moderating factors such as advertisers and owners, hence market factors. I guess that a forum about a particular product gives a potential buyer a more general view than both blogs and mass media does. Mass media often raise hopes and works as PR channels although we don’t expect them to.
Blogs are also affected by market features since blog authors often are sponsored, which as a reader can be hard or in some cases very easy to notice. The suggestion about being able to rate independency of a blog is very interesting and also important for a reader in evaluating relevance and reliability. However, I guess this kind of rating system will be hard to manage.
Although I think that blogs are more personal and unreliable than other kinds of media, I also find myself believe some blogs more than other media, hence I find them more valuable. Blogs that I follow more often and have read for a longer time period actually affects me more than classical mass media just because they are more personal and I believe I can judge the character of the writer.
Well, I quite agree with your opinion that there are no such standardized objective criteria to estimate the quality of the new social media content. What stands for the high quality? First and foremost, the contents should make the audience be convinced. "Do you believe?" It really makes sense.
So the criteria for the quality level of the social media content are so subjective. It depends largely on the audiences' needs. Whether the offerings can satisfy the audiences' flavors and tastes become quite important.
Personally speaking, if I'd like to buy a new cell phone, I would prefer to surf on quite a lot related forums or Bloggers rather than searching information on the official website only. I would not say which kind of content possesses a higher quality standard. There are some inter-supplementations among the contents. If you want to get the exact information, I believe there are no already made ones. What you need to do is comparing by yourself. In other words, the new social media contents force people to think more than before, which can be regarded as an societal improvement. We are human beings; we need to think by ourselves independently. You can never totally trust what is the so called high quality as the experts describe.
I do agree with you that forums may also contain “company users”, and there are also many "professional Blogger writers"(there are some professional Blogger writers who write for the celebrities). However, in my opinion, the authenticity issue of the content could be checked with the development of the Internet technology. With the development of the internet technology, the available source online could be transparent and traceable. Those false and fake information could be eliminated in this way.
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I agree that more and more blogs are commercialized. The writers may write things on purpose but not his/her real opinion. Or some blog owners publish some contents, which reference from other website and has nothing to do with their blog topical subject. From those blogs we can not get what we want usually. As I always subscribe some blogs which I am interested in, now I am usually happy that they update their blogs but sad after finding the news is not new.
About the problem of the quality of the information of the blogs which may operate by companies, I think when we come to one topic, we always search and read some related news. Most of the time, readers can differ useful information from the mislead information. I have the same idea as you when I want to buy a camera. I search information about camera in different forums. There I know which camera is best and where to buy it with good quality but cheap. The most obvious difference between traditional media and social media is that we can find information easier with social media and it also provide us a platform of communication.
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