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Essay about Social Media and News

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The world exists within a state of flux, constantly changing and evolving according to the ever-shifting sands of technological innovation. On rare occasions, human ingenuity gives birth to a technical creation so profoundly revolutionary, so completely and ubiquitously life altering, that the world itself is irrevocably altered by it. Social media applications like Facebook and Twitter unquestionably belong in this category, joining such illustrious world changers as the printing press, radio, and television. Products of the Information Age made possible by the global, telecommunications infrastructure, social media applications have profoundly altered the manner in which human beings communicate, collaborate, and consume. For the …show more content…

Members of disparate geographic, religious, and ethnic cultures co-mingle freely and openly in this newly emerged super-culture of connectedness, reducing, if not eliminating, the many barriers that once made cross-cultural communication a near impossibility. Alongside Facebook in terms of influence and ubiquity stands Twitter, the service allowing users to communicate globally via short, text-based posts called “tweets” of up to 140 characters. Officially launched in 2006, the online service experienced a rather slow rate of adoption, sharing on average only five thousand tweets per day. By 2009, that number had grown to 2.5 million, and by June of 2011 the average number of tweets per day exceeded a staggering 200 million. (Gervai) According to a June, 2011 post on the official Twitter blog, “the world writes the equivalent of a 10 million-page book” each day. (Twitter) Today, nearly every politician in America makes use of the ever growing Twitter community, particularly during campaign season. According to the website Wefollow.com, which ranks Twitter users according to number of followers, President Barack Obama alone has over 7.8 million followers; he is topped only by Lady Gaga at 9.8 million. Twitter has evolved into an incredibly powerful tool for those with a message to communicate, and it has

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