“Put all your eggs in one basket… the handle’s going to break. Then all you’ve got is scrambled eggs.” -Nora Roberts (2010).“Hot Rocks,” p. 183, Penguin
Any experienced financial planner worth their salt will tell you never to put all your eggs in one basket. Sure, the market looks great right now. But when everything comes back down, and it eventually will, because it always does, you need to have a balanced financial portfolio, so you do not lose everything. We can apply this same advice to various other examples other than financial planning. The same can be said about our use of technology and social media too.
It is officially 2020 – the start of a new year and a new generation.
And digital media is everywhere!
Traditional media such as print newspapers, the
yellow pages, local radio stations, and television stations are being replaced
by faster, digital mediums that we can access from anywhere at any time.
According to Public Relations Society of America, Inc. (
PRSA), traditional media usually
focuses its content on a specific audience.
One of the significant disadvantages to more conventional forms of media
is that, often, once the information is out to the public, no changes can be
made.
Aside from traditionally being a form of one-way
communication, there is often a delay before releasing the news/information to
the people as well.
However, the news
provided by traditional media tends to be more reliable and accurate, per
PRSA.
In contrast, other than television, which still ranks number
one, Americans now receive their news reports more often via social media than
other traditional forms of media, such as newspapers and radio.
A 2018 Pew Research study reports that
approximately 68 percent of adults in the U.S. receive their news via social
media sites.
The people that use social media for their main source of news prefer it to traditional
media primarily because of its accessibility and adaptability. As mentioned in an article by
PRSA, people are drawn to social media
over traditional because of its ability to influence mass audiences at once. People typically prefer this two-way form
of communication because, as previously stated, we can access social media
whenever we want. Despite all of the benefits of social media, the majority of people still believe it is unreliable
regarding their news as well as other relevant information.
“Even
though a substantial portion of U.S. adults at least occasionally get news on
social media, over half (57%) of these news consumers say they expect the news they see on social media to be largely
inaccurate.” - Pew Research, 2018
As consumers, why do the majority of us approve of social media feeding us inaccurate information? And our political news is not the only information that has been drastically affected by the spread of "fake news" and misinformation. As reported by
Business News Daily, "Anyone can plaster false information on an image and turn it into a viral meme, which is incredibly dangerous," Patton-Carson said. "It has also created headline-only readers. People are now less likely to fully read articles and get the entire story." Because of this, we are phasing out traditional media
organizations we have trusted to deliver accurate news/information to us (some
for over 100 years), and that we have relied upon to provide thousands of
steady paying jobs for hard-working, honorable people. We are trading them for these social media sites that
we knowingly feed us “fake news” regularly, leading to divisive behavior and
confusion among readers. It is imperative
to point out that news media (newspapers, television news programs, radio, etc.) has always been somewhat biased based on ownership and demographics. Nevertheless, social media has taken our news
and turned it into something unlike anything we could have ever imagined, both good and bad.
In the past, executives relied on traditional media because
it was a safe investment; it did not appear to be going anywhere. The belief was that the public would always need their news. That was until we realized how revolutionary
the web was, and began using it for more than simple information inquiries and sending email. So far, the possibilities have
been endless as to what we can accomplish using the Internet and the web. The web has allowed us to provide news/information
to the public with the mere click of a button, at virtually no cost to the
consumer. As consumers, it's a win-win
situation. For traditional media
executives and employees, on the other hand, it has been a roller coaster ride. The dot.com era created an abundance of websites
for the public to explore and obtain their information. To move with the times, traditional media/news
publications needed to develop digital websites because that was how the majority
of Americans were accessing their data. Many
smaller, local companies unable to compete with corporate America folded,
laying off thousands of reporters, news anchors, editors, etc. Only the strong have been able to survive. Even that is changing now.
Digital media sites like BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and Axios are
online news organizations that emerged from our online modernization. When BuzzFeed was created, social media sites
like Facebook were not typically used by consumers as a primary source of news;
therefore, its readers saw BuzzFeed as a valuable source for news, and Facebook was
merely for socializing and sharing pictures.
In fact, Ben Thompson, an analyst favored by the Silicon Valley crowd,
stated in 2015 that
BuzzFeed was “the most important news organization in the
world.” However, in 2019, many of these
digital media websites were forced to lay off thousands of employees
combined. So what happened?
Today, social media sites like Facebook and YouTube are replacing
not only the trusted print news publications such as
The New York Times,
The Wall Street Journal, and
The Atlantic but the newer digital
publications too
. In the beginning,
BuzzFeed was considered to be the news site that the others should model
because they knew how digital media worked and where it was going. Lee, with
The New York Times inquires, “Didn’t its team of wizards,
led by the M.I.T.-trained chief executive, Jonah Peretti, know tricks of the
digital trade that lay beyond the imagination of fusty old print publishers?” Thereupon, I ask, are we putting too much
faith in social media to disseminate our news to the public? Are we foolishly putting all of our eggs in
one basket?
In 2016, PR experts declared that social media was “on the
rise.” According to
PRSA, the worldwide
social media analytics market is on a path to increase from $1.6 billion in
2015 to $5.4 billion in 2020, based on a
PR Newswire release. Thus, Roy asked the pressing questions – “Are
we still defining it as “rising” because we are expecting it to eventually
plateau? Or is it because we are still
comparing it to traditional media, which did rise and eventually began to
decline?” In my opinion, social media companies such as Facebook, are becoming so large worldwide, that they are setting themselves up for either a) a mandated break-up into smaller companies due to a monopoly control (ex. the Breakup of the Bell System, 1984), b) going bankrupt when the market eventually crashes (which it will), or c) they crash and burn because they took on too much, too fast, and didn't diversify enough. (I am sure there are many more possibilities of what may happen to them in the future).
True, we do like the flexibility and convenience social media provides to us. The ability to converse with our friends and family while posting pictures and sharing "relevant" news stories, all while we are checking out at the grocery store, appeals to the average American. However, no one knows what the future of technology and news holds for us. Will we continue to be complicit and allow social media sites to spread divisive information, or will the public finally grow tired of the unreliable news available on social media websites and take a stand? In time, will social media websites wipe out traditional media all together? Only time will tell. Either way, digital media will evolve again, and what goes up eventually must come back down.
“The truth? What's that? Don't you know that the day has come when the truth is what we care to make it?” ― Iain Crichton Smith, Consider the Lilies
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