news and information in social media.

Social media has allowed everyday citizens to become authors, editors, and publishers of news and information. Do you believe that social media has increased the quality of news and information or decreased it?

Personally I believe that social media has increased the quantity of information and news found on the internet, however I’m not so sure it has increased the quality. Social media has allowed anybody and everybody to publish information and news, whether they are a credible source or not.  Any person can go on Twitter, Facebook, blogs or any other social media type site and make up a story or post a picture that is not true and make everybody else believe the story. Photoshop has made it easy to create a photo, and like we say now, a picture is worth a thousand words. As a highly social animal, the human being tends to exaggerate in order to make his/her stories more appealing and exciting. Social media has just increased the rate at which we get news stories, whether they are false or true.

However I do think that social media has increased our ability to get the correct news information quicker. It just depends on us as readers to go to credible sources instead of random news blogs.  Like for me I would go to CTV or CP24 websites or verified twitter pages before i would go to a random blog. Pretty much all major newspapers and T.V stations have social media sites that stream live news stories and allow people to comment and send in their own pictures and reports stories as they are happening. This in my opinion is the upside of news in social media. 

All I know is that we need to take what all these social media news outlets say with a grain of salt.

Digg is one of the most popular, trusted news social media outlets on the web today.

so how big is social media ?

What is your perception of social media, do you think it is a fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

In my opinion social media is one of the biggest shifts since the industrial revolution and much more than a fad. Social media has changed the way our world works, how we now communicate with each other. It has allowed us to completely change the way we are able to share ourselves and our thoughts with the world, and tons of people are taking advantage of the opportunity. For example just yesterday I read that Facebook now has over 750 million active users and that people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the website, and that's only one of the hundreds of social media sites out there on the web.

Social media is at work in many ways. It is a way to advertise your business, share that special talent no one ever knew you had, show your breathtaking photos and keep people informed on your day to day life. For me, social media is a way to talk to my love ones at home face to face, a place to find an amazing photographer for my brothers wedding and a way for my mother to keep checking up on me ;)  

For businesses social media allows for peer reviews, which many business owners have said are more valuable and bring more business then weeks of advertising, not to mention the fact that it's free. 

For young artists social media allows them to be heard by thousands of people around the globe and allows them to be recognized for good and sometimes not so good talent. ITS FRIDAY, FRIDAY, GOTTA GET DOWN ON FRIDAY :)  

http://engaugemedia.com/

The point is that social media is a part of life, one way or another, for most of us today.  Just look at the statistics above ! Social media will only continue to grow, for example look at Google with their new site Google+. Companies are invested in social media because it is the present and most defiantly the future too. 

http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/

https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

http://engaugemedia.com/