Media As A Social Instrument Of Communication: The Importance Of Social Media

Media is known to us as a tool for communication purpose like a newspaper, a radio, letter, television, and so on. These sorts of media are mainly used to connect two or more people together apart from being a way to deliver information and news. That being said, social media would be a social instrument of communication. Social media exist because of the technological advancements made by us human. It could be a website that gives us the information, and at the same time interacts with us while giving that information. To distinguish social media from regular media, consider regular media as one-way street where you can receive information such as by reading a newspaper or watching news on television, but you have very restricted ability to

Although social media is supposed to help connect people from all around the world, ironically, it has the potential to make us less social. For a social media to be a truly effective communication tool, all users hold an obligation to be honest, accurate, and not allow online networking to replace human contact completely. In the workplace for instance, the use of electronic communication has overtaken face-to-face and voice-to-voice communication widely (Tardanico, 2012). People nowadays would prefer to use instant messaging or other social media rather than hanging out and talk with someone. The growing usage of social networking sites easily influence people to have their own social media sites and making them addicted to online interactions which, when used excessively, will degrade the quality of face to face interactions. A very common case about social media interactions is that people tend to show only the things about themselves that they want people to know and at the same time hiding another side of them that would change others’ opinion about them (Serra, 2014). This is probably due to the need to have bunch of online friends to have their back and

According to Kaitlin in Students Journal of Media Literacy Education in 2010, social network sites provided many different portals through which we get information and create more ways for users to pick their own preferred news outlet such as television, films, music, the internet, print, advertisements, and others. Instead of reading old school materials such as the newspaper, we now have the tendency to depend on our friends on the sites to give us updates on the world around us through Facebook posts, tweets and so on. This new diverse way of receiving information can remove the necessity to discuss these events in person or by face-to-face discussion. When one person tells a story to another person, with the help of social media, suddenly that piece of news is everywhere or as they say now, viral. Sometimes the piece of news is even incorrect or misinterpreted after it has gone through many different people. This does not always happen intentionally, but different people take news in different ways and this opens up room for errors. By using social media as a medium, the news is easily twisted and it is very hard to distinguish the news whether it is real or not real. Therefore, the need of having real conversation or face-to-face communication is really important because of the trend in sharing information through social media has increased and