central focus of mass media.
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Through the media we expand our understanding of people and social issues beyond what we experience
in person. There exist two forms taken by mass media; printed and electronic. Printed media include newspapers, magazines, and books;
electronic media include radio, television, motion pictures, and the internet. The latest type of electronic media, the internet, with the help
of computer technology has delivered a new variant of media, the digital media.
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5. The Relevance of Social Media and Twitter
a. The Relevance of Social Media
Social network sites social media are Web 2.0
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-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public
profile and share a connection within a system.
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Kaplan and Haenlein defined:
Social media are a group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations
of Web 2.0 that allow the creation and exchange of user- generated content.
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Based on the given definitions, we can extract two major
elements in understanding social media. First, the internet is
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George Rodman, Mass Media in a Changing World 3
rd
Ed ., New York: McGraw-Hill,
2010, p. 5.
75
Shirley Biagi, MediaImpact: An Introduction to Mass Media 9
th
Ed ., Boston:
Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2010, p. 187.
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Web 2.0 is a term that was invented at a conference of Web experts that followed the
dot-com crash in 2001. It includes all of the online technologies that enable anyone with a computer to become a provider of their own data in a form that would allow remixing by others.
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Danah M. Boyd and Nicole B. Ellison , “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and
Scholarship ” in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 13, no. 1 2007, pp. 210-
230.
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Andreas M. Kaplan Michael Haenlein, loc. cit., pp. 59-68.
needed by social media to connect them through the World Wide Web, which means they can be accessed literally everywhere.
Second, the exact limitation of who can have access to them is non-existent resulting the users to have the opportunity to provide
and transmit their own materials to the bigger community. In lieu of broadcasting, social media provide platforms which are not
homogeneous. There exist different forms of social media, such as social networking sites e.g. Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn,
content communities e.g. Youtube and Flickr, micro-blogging e.g. Twitter, and so on.
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The growing relevance of communication in social media implies fundamental change in traditional public communication,
which has usually been exclusively initiated and managed by specific actors, e.g., politicians, companies as well as journalists.
This is different than what news institutions used to do in the past. Historically, companies were able to control the information by
using press announcements and good public relations. Social media have become outlets for the exchange of
information about various aspects of life and have shown their relevance in becoming objects of scientific analysis.
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This presents an agenda in educating the public on particular programs,
policies, or events and issues which is the purported goal. This
79
Minavere V. Bardici, loc. cit., p. 1.
80
Stefan Stieglitz Linh Dang-Xuan, Social Media and Political Communication: a Social Media Analytics Framework
, Muenster: Springer-Verlag, 2012, p. 1.
gives opinion change on the issue a major advantage. Changes in public opinion can occur when there is a systematicand permanent
change in the way the media, entertainment and news, present the livesand issues of minorities.
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b. The Relevance of Twitter
