Essay 2- Social Media Quality

The quality problem is one of the critical issues in new social media. As I pointed out in my previous post, there are several issues to discuss in this area. It could be involved to criminal issues, terrorism, abusing people’s authority or deceiving them. On the other hand, it can destroy and change the taste of people about what the good quality is. I mean it can change the whole concept of what the quality means. Just imagine that most of the mass-media corporations become bankrupt gradually because of losing their customers steadily; and hence we have thousands or millions of information sources around us which are user-generated data. Of course, we think that we have chosen the best of them but are they really the best ones?

We should point out to the inevitable positive consequences of new social media as well. In my point of view, new social media has helped people to express themselves and their beliefs freely without any supervising, censorship, social consideration and so on. It is helping people who are struggling for having democracy in order to decrease the power of governments in suppressing the freedom of speech. But is there any reliable filter in order to prevent ourselves from being deceived or misled by the biased content that we think is true.

There are two ways on how to observe the quality of this new media nowadays. One way is by employed staffs and another one is by users themselves like Google and Slashdot. It still works but it has some shortcomings as well. The employed staffs have no enough time to investigate all the produced materials especially when the number of produt issues is increasing due to the shift of internet users as new generations –so called internet generation- are getting older and therefore the number of material producers will be excessively large.

On the other hand, in user moderating models if there is a wave of new belief in the society about something but really it is not true or good, then instead of bad comments on a special posting about that issue, we will encounter supportive good comments on that. Psychologically point of view, when you see that large numbers of people agree on something, then you would never disagree to that even if you think reversely. So, in that case there is a prejudice to your way of thinking and reciprocally that belief will be amplified and become accepted in the society as a normative but it is not and there is no means to prevent it even if scientists or elites are against it. Hence, the truth will be lost and no one does realize that.

For me, as I experienced, I usually rely on the news or links that I see on the blogs of the people that I know and I like their points of views or they are socially respected. I think this way of filtering for myself is a way that works for me but it can have bad aspects too; as I narrow my mind gradually to one type of point of view and cannot criticize it with an opposition thinking. By the way, it is considerable that new digital social media works usually like a forum and you can see different comments on a link or news. As you can see even in famous news website like BBC you can put comments on the news, so people can see different views but of course there is always some kind of moderation or censorship in those websites in order to prevent publishing some critical comments.

Another aspect of quality is about entertainment which I pointed out at first, that maybe the user-generated data in long term causes bankruptcy in big media corporations and gradually change the taste of people for the quality of a product. Because amateurs cannot produce good quality clips or movies but you may become accustomed to them but you may lose motivation to watch them gradually because it does not satisfy you; and when there is no big corporation to do it professionally, it can destroy your motivation to media as an entertainment and finally a very good lucrative market will be shut down because there is no customer and also no good producer!!!