P90X ROUND 2

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

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?

    I feel sort of conflicted towards whether or not social media has decreased or increased the quality of news and information. On one hand, it has definitely decreased in grammar quality and in terms of detailed information given. However on the other hand, it has increased with the quality of photos and the types of news being shown or documented. The reason the grammar quality has decreased is because anyone can now post news and information as it happens. The problem with this being, there are many people in the world who lack proper grammar skills and the vocabulary to really bring news to life.

With regards to photo quality, it isn't so much the quality but the amount of photos being shown along with report of events as they happen. Take Twitter for instance, when a large media event such as the VMA's or an even larger event on a world scale happens, thousands upon thousands of photos are being tweeted within seconds of one another. Instead of having to wait for a newspaper the next day, these photos are coming in live and showing you what's happening. With this, I don't find you need a lot of context or perfect grammar because the photos do most of the talking.  However the purpose of this assignment is to choose a side, and even though it's by a small margin, I would say that social media has increased the quality of news. I feel as if there's just more of the information being provided, it's not condensed and it's beneficial to those who want updates as fast as possible. There are downsides of information coming in from too many sources at once, sometimes it goes through what I call the "telephone path". Basically one person will read information and misinterpret it, then the person will post it or talk about it while leading others to believe false information to be true.  However, through all of that I still believe that there is much more information being provided and it outweighs any of the negatives in my book.