Wong Ka Wah
This blog post was produced as part of the course “Social Media, Ideologies, and Ethics in the United States” at the University of Turku.
What an amazing memory: Me, a student from Hong Kong, walking into a class with people from different backgrounds to discuss and learn about social media in Finland. The class discussions always gave me a lot of food for thought. During and after the conversations with my classmates, my mind was full of different ideas. I was impressed by the discussion about social media, especially during the second lesson where we were asked: “Do you agree with Postman that media such as television have a clearly negative impact on public discourse? What is the positive impact of a specific medium such as social media, on public discourse?” This discussion made me think about the relation between different media and different individuals. Personally, I think this is a dynamic and complicated relationship. Social media has both positive and negative impacts on its users.
First, on the negative side, people’s thoughts and behavior can easily be influenced by different media because it is impossible to dodge the information flow. Messages from the media are everywhere: advertisements, news, television and entertainment, etc. Especially under the trend of globalization, the pace and frequency of the exchange of information is exhausting. People are exposed in a society full of information. They do not have sufficient time to digest or process the information they receive every moment. The more passive we are, the more easily we can be influenced by the senders of the information, that is to say the media. Our class provided a good example of this. We should not only take in the information presented to us without processing it in interaction with the whole class. Our thoughts can easily be influenced. Everyone can be aware this and try to employ more critical thinking.
On the positive side, new media make information exchange faster and more convenient. They provide a lot of entertainment. They can also be a platform for different people to discuss or even organize social movements. People can share their thoughts and try to convince others through discussions on these free and transparent public platforms.
Someone might think the relationship between traditional media and social media is quite competitive or that they are mutually exclusive. Younger generations tend to use social media more than traditional media, and the circulations of newspapers have been decreasing in a lot of developed countries. For me, they are not competitors. Rather, they can utilize each other. They each have their unique position in the world, and the audience will have different interpretations of these two kinds of media. For example, traditional media are more convincing.
As I mentioned, it is inevitable to receive tons of information nowadays. However, we can choose to be content creators or receivers, and stay aware of how easily we can be influenced if we do not take the time to process information. We can try to find a solution. What I wish to emphasize is that we have to learn how to strike a balance between receiving information and digesting it.