Social Media & News

In Christian Fuchs Social Media and the Public Sphere he discusses the transformative power of new technologies. By drawing on the concept of Habermas’s public sphere, Fuchs believes that social media puts focus on political and cultural communication. Unlike Habermas’s idea that says the public sphere is a question of its member’s command of resources. Social media in turn has become key in defining the public discourse for these social media platforms.  What this article reminded me of was the way we share and learn about important news events. For me I personally have found out major events through social media sites before hearing it on the news. This of course was not always the way people accessed important news information, and I find it very interesting how social media has caused a shift in how we search for information.

http://www.journalism.org/2015/07/14/the-evolving-role-of-news-on-twitter-and-facebook/

I came across this report by Pew Research Centre that shows the statistics on how many people are sharing news stories via social media.  From this the research shows that users are actually turning to these sites to fulfill different types of information needs. Its really interesting how we can seek out information in different ways and the transformative power social media has in how we seek it.

Do you find you get your information from social media sites more frequently than from specific news sites? Why do you think that is?