When comparing social media with traditional mass media in terms of quality, apparently the technical advantages mainly take shape the gap, in spite of the limitation of time, location and the amount of information, new social media provide the opportunity for audience to interact with the author and other people, which turn the previous audience into the contributors, and increase the mobility and their initiative.
However, the relationship between social media and traditional mass media is still interlaced and interdependence.
Firstly, the development of social media depends on the traditional/mass media profoundly. Mainly restricted by the width of speed of broadband and the shortage of the source of information, the social media could get supplement from traditional media. Take cable TV provider for example, they have already the built the network which could be easily converted into internet with much higher speed, which is the basis of new era of internet. In another hand, the traditional media companies’ network of gathering information and the whole crew of collection and edition could provide abundant resource for social media, which significant in the completion of social media where “content is king”. In addition, many of the traditional mass media have powerful asset of brand, which have built favorable authority and credibility among audience. By building alliance with them, the social media will gain more power on resisting the spam, wrong or fraudulent information which are caused by anonymity.
Secondly, by stimulated and driven by new social media, traditional mass media could keep on improving themselves. To react with the new social media, traditional mass media have to improve themselves by making use of the social media; for example, reforming the news reporting system, developing online news website or on demand service, news delivery through multimedia and so on. As the matter of fact, hundreds of thousands of newspaper, TV network providers and radio have built online service, which brought them the advantage of large amount of information and high speed rate of information transmission.
To conclude, new social media and traditional mass media could improve and make up each other’s disadvantage and accelerate the development. The cooperation and interaction between will be the new trend of the media industry.
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2 comments:
I think that a convergence between traditional mass media and social media sounds really interesting and is happening to a larger extent now than it did some few years ago. Although, as Marco stated in his lecture, social media companies are still bigger than traditional mass media companies, such as CNN and BBC, online. Traditional Swedish papers have definitely increased their social media content and traditional media business models at media conglomerates now also include independent online social media companies. These are making use of all sorts of media technologies while still benefiting from their brand equity. They are helpful in picking out and editing content; however, new social media sites are still in many cases just as or even more successful in terms of users. Users find forums in social media that make more sense and seem more valuable to them than traditional market-based mass media. Social media also ad new interaction methods that may be hard to introduce to traditional media channels, a simple example is that showing all comments on articles may not be allowed on traditional media sites. Truly subjective thoughts is not expressed to the same extent in traditional media as it is in social media, this is something that makes social media more valuable and trustworthy to some people. However, also believe that social and traditional media can keep up converging and complement each other.
It is true that you cannot make such a clear physical geography boundary between the new social media and the traditional media. The new Medias are generally developed based on the traditional Medias, and conversely new Medias bring and inject so many new ideas and energy into the traditional media developing mode. So we can say they are intertwined and interdependent. However, we cannot say which is better or worse.
For many media conglomerate, both new media and traditional media are within their business ranges. They are used as different tools to penetrate different customer segmentations based on demographical elements. A case in point could be the CNN or BBC Company. They publish the traditional daily newspapers, meanwhile, the electronic version can be access to online simultaneously as well with some interactive activities with the audiences in terms of available comment function or I-report(the audience can make the news videos by themselves and upload them on the website) function. Compared with the traditional newspaper, the related videos make the news more vivid and impressive.
Another point which i would like to mention is the culture issue which is very significant for the media business. For instance, the Swedes have a really strong culture to read newspapers on the bus or the subway, hence the traditional media newspaper like Metro and Stockholm City works very well in Sweden. However, in some other parts of the world, like in the USA, the people are more likely to surf online to read the news.
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