In a society where driving is accompanied by a talking car, walking is replaced with hover boards, and spying is used with flying drones, I cannot help but think how close we are as a civilization to living like The Jetsons. Due to the emergence of social media, one commodity that has been revolutionized in the past decade is news. In 2015, Pere Masip, a professor at the University of Ramon Llull, concluded that “the use of social networks is associated with friends and relationships; however, the second most popular activity in social networks is accessing news” (Masip “Audience Behavior”). As the productions and sales of print media have drastically declined, social media accounts continue to skyrocket. As discussed in lecture, Facebook and …show more content…
Instead of waiting around a post, or television, or radio, mobile apps alert users with updates and notifications from their phone or wrist watch regardless of where they are. Another way social media have changed the news is the way it looks. On Twitter, since tweets are limited to 140 characters, news is brief and to the point. This makes every piece of information a headline, with links to articles, photos, and videos. Also, with sites such as Periscope, users can live stream content. This gives people first-hand experience and a new way of looking at the news. Pew Research Center found in their research that “59 percent of Twitter users said they follow breaking news on the platform, compared to just 31 percent of Facebook users who find breaking news there” (Lichterman). Social media have started to become a platform for breaking news like royal weddings, deaths, and even political campaigns. During the 2012 presidential race, former House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, posted on Twitter that he’ll be running for president of the United States (Strom). With print and television news, a person may have to wait hours to a day to be updated on a subject. Now, with every news outlet at a person’s fingertips, they can access news by the second. We consume news in abundance because we do not have to wait until the next morning. We can access whatever we want, whenever we want, no matter where we are. This effect is related to the accessibility and time advantage social media news has over mainstream