Wall & El Zahed 's Paper Centering On The Environment Surrounding The Movement Of Information Within A Single Country

Most everyone has some form of social media. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram people have a way of communicating and getting news from all around the world. Unfortunately, this news is not always correct or trustworthy. Many people are not attuned to reading long articles or papers and just want the short story. Social media readily gives them shortened and condensed stories one after the other. Therefore, “traditional media has to adapt to the audience’s new

As Canadians, we live in a country of democracy and freedom, which provide equal opportunities for all citizens to share their thoughts. Unlike Canadians who are able to influence the direction of political value, Syrians are under Internet censorship and surveillance by their own country. Censorship caused the local government to filters online content block many websites, limiting citizens’ accessibility to create user generated content. Furthermore, Internet access was only given to a privileged minority. In the year of 2011, the first wave of protests - the Arab Spring, spread across the Middle East. As the civil war rages, death toll raised to 250,000, nearly half of them civilians. Also, a large number of people fled their homes, seeking

With the increase in use technology and social media, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a relevant article to today: “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted”. After reading Gladwell’s article, I found myself agreeing to his ideas that social networks, although convenient in spreading information and raising awareness, are ineffective in creating the bond and community necessary to make a change or a big impact in society.

In today’s society, remaining connected and knowledgeable of current events and the newest trends is vital to staying ahead in business, education, and social standing. This information is supplied to everyone through the internet, newspapers, television, and radio. One can tune into stations such as CNN, NBC, Fox News, Al-Jazeera, and many others (“SQs of Media Outlets”). In order to meet the needs of viewers, readers, and listeners, the ideal media system would contain accurate, quick information, with a purely impartial view on the facts as they are known. However, this modern media system has not maintained an objective view, pushing opinionated and slanted reporting onto the population in order to create profit and gain customers. The exploitation of information media for personal gain has created a toxic and inaccurate present, constant in today’s society.

Johan Pouwelse, a professor at Delft University and a technological company founder, has written several articles (Pouwelse) that stress the dangers of filtering the internet. One such article is “Moving Toward a Censorship-free Internet,” which was published in the Internet Engineering Task Force Journal (IETF). In this article, Pouwelse references the Arab Spring, which was a set of revolutions that took place throughout the Arab world in 2011 and 2012 and resulted in overthrows of oppressive governments. In nearly all the affected nations, dissenters used Twitter and Facebook to organize their protests and planned outcries (Heins). These two social media platforms are easily accessible and allow their users to post any information that they please; this served as both a benefit and a drawback during the protests. “During the 2011 Arab Spring,” Pouwelse writes in in his article for the IETF, “Egyptian authorities demanded that telecommunication companies sever their broadband connections and mobile networks—both local and European operators were forced to comply, and, as a result, digital Egypt vanished.” The world stopped receiving tweets from their Egyptian contacts, stopped viewing videos posted to YouTube by Egyptian vloggers. Online entertainment halted, which was a victory for the government. However, this blackout did not put a stop to open criticism, as the Egyptian government intended. The

Giving users the capability to choose and select what appears on their media pages encourages bias by allowing the formation of fragmented social groups that have polarized opinions on specific issues and current events (Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic 2015). In response to these tendencies, news reporting agencies have learned to adapt and launch digital forms of mainstream media to propagate their news targeted at social media outlets, giving them the freedom to spread the agenda they want to communicate, knowing that their target audience can easily find and share them using social media (Calais Guerra, et.al 2011) further propagating bias news reporting.

In “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” James Fallows studies the use of social media, opposed to the archaic news of print and television, as a journalism tool. Over the past two decades, the general public’s intake of news has changed drastically. The headline newspapers severed a major decline in audience, but the Internet held a new location to store a “more market-minded, profit driven journalism.”

Recently we can see that online newspapers , blogs and social medias are playing a vital role in Bangladeshi society. They become sources of controversial issues , they become the catalyst of mass protest , they are now the medium of becoming united to raise voice against violations and again they are also used or exploited to do some kind of violations. Increasing number of Facebook and blog users in Bangladesh is creating some incidents those indicate that the pattern of public responses is changing because of the online media. Bloggers and Facebook users expressing theirs opinions about society , culture , politics , religion and sometimes they become the victims of the opposition for expressing their views. Killings of the bloggers , protests against the violations against women , discussions in Facebook about the war criminal tribunal and the steps by the government of limiting the social media for somedays - all are the signs that online media is influencing the society of Bangladesh.

Facebook is a worldwide acknowledged social media service, that because of its sheer size, it possesses the ultimate power to influence and potentially morph its user’s perspectives, by simply exposing them to biased articles, headlines and even messages, motivating them to act on what they are displayed with. Author, Farhad Manjoo of the deprecatory article ‘Facebook 's bias is built in - and worth watching’, expresses his fear of Facebook’s ability to control the news; ‘Facebook is the world’s most influential source of news’.

Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben was also ousted as a result of revolts formed from the reports from private citizens. Social media is so powerful; the government of Malawi has shut down news websites and social media networks including Twitter and Facebook to prevent suffering the same fate as other dictatorship based governments. Cameroonian government has banned the use of social media. In Uganda, the government temporarily closed social networks after threatening ISPs with closure. The members of the current “Occupy Wall Street” movements use social media to organize their political movement and gain members. Boudreau’s article suggests “Occupy Wall Street has spread around the country with keyboard-clicking quickness as participants tap into Twitter, Facebook and microblogging site Tumblr to call Americans to the streets to protest what they see as a broken global financial system. What would have taken months to unfold in a different era has occurred in days and hours. The Economist magazine calls it America’s first true social-media uprising”(Broudreau). Revis article states “These citizen journalists fight to create a well-informed public in which media also serves as moral education. This philosophy radically departs from mainstream journalism, an overarching goal of which is to sell its product. Citizen journalism, on the other hand, allows marginalized people to reclaim their voices, to tell their otherwise silenced stories firsthand”

Joan Cornell notes that the Internet democratizes the journalism which was in the hand of the few people (2003). The Internet makes the public access to information; at the same time, it creates the public to be journalists, opening blogs to put something new around on the Internet. Many news websites like The Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC allows some personification. The journalism nowadays is facing challenges not only from media and technology convergence, but also from audience they serve (Bowman and Willis 2003). For example, in MSNBC’s my MSN part, one can post news by yourself. While the audience are participating in the process of journalism with the aid of the Internet, it cannot be neglected by mainstream media.

Development of technology raises the role of internet as media for citizenjournalism. People are now having wider access for writing and made opinion aboutan event. Technology is a facilitator for moving information,” and the availability ofinformation has in turn affected the fields of philanthropy, education, media,government (e.g. The Sunlight Foundation), and many more.13 One of the factor in theemerge of citizen journalism is development of technology. Citizen journalism canhave more access to wider coverage area of information, because internet as mainmedia where most citizen journalism take place, can be accessed in all over the world.Another example of how powerful citizen journalism in spreading the news is tragedyof London’s bombingin

This study is taking a quantitative approach contain analysis and for that selecting three representative newspapers and journalists in the Saudi Arabia, which are Al Riyadh, Sabq, Asharq Al‑Awsat and Twitter accounts of three journalists on Twitter to collect the required data. Moreover, this method is more suitable because it is creating an observation on the news posted by the newspapers that we have selected. Furthermore, it is important to note down that how journalists are publishing the breaking news or retweet the breaking news from newspapers or other journalists. From a review of previous research shows that many of the researchers relied on the content analysis because it gives accurate results through observation and monitoring of the variables that are used in the research questions. Content analysis will be used instead of a survey, longitudinal analysis, or a secondary analysis because it is difficult to get accurate results from of previous research. Additionally, Saudi Arabia is a new area in new media and there is not much of the previous research in this area about the new media in Saudi Arabia. The questionnaire may be suitable for this study, but perhaps does not respond to the questionnaire will be the right way, because most of the people do not consider survey as an important thing and they do not answer it clearly. So, as I pointed out earlier content analysis is the best for this study.

To wholly have a grasp on how this new founded approach to journalism has changed alongside technology—as well as understanding the dangers such openness brings forth—one has to understand what exactly those changes are. Primarily, those that are writing for the sake of offering information have, whether willingly or not, fed into the usage of social media as it has become a centralized method of distribution that is relatively inescapable with the current times. As such those framing the news for the masses find an authentic avenue to stay in contact via social media that has benefits ranging from, “its extraordinary newsgathering potential; its potential as a new tool to engage the audience; and as a way of distributing our news” (Eltringham, 2012), all of which are deeply different from the presentation of reporting that occurred during earlier eras. Days of strongly structured instances of journalism that could not travel with such speed have been replaced as, “social media has trashed many of the foundations on

Contemporary social movements such as Arab Spring and Kony 2012 use the Internet and social media as potential tools towards change. But why are some more successful than others. This paper argues that when news outlets see the potential for change, they “premediate” (Richard Grusin) its possibilities, and make that change ever more possible in their coverage. On the other hand, extant stories that are more reactionary do not get the same amount of new exposure, and remain static. In other words, our media - not just social media, but news organizations - play a great role in shaping current events. I will compare and contrast the unfolding of the Arab Spring story, and how little changed regarding Kony 2012, as cases in point.