4) Velocity of News Spread through Social Networking

Kony2012: once information goes viral, there's no stopping it. 

Social networking has become one of the most popular reasons to connect to the Internet these days. Social media, particularly allowed users to take pictures and videos of the event and it is a very effective avenue for doing this. To this point, social networking sites are getting more publicity and its popularity is vigorously increasing. It is mainly due to this world full of people energetically spread news and the strong persuasion bond between one another. Personally, I think social networking sites are a very good way to connect people. According to Hughes (2008), "this unwieldy frontier for disaster activity as a matter of social convergence parallels geographical on-site behavior".

This video shows the dreadful devastation the army of child soldiers that turned slaves in Ugandan. It is a video that took roughly 30-minute-long, titled with ‘Invisible Children’. This video goes massively viral online with 14.4m views on Vimeo and more than 49m on YouTube at the time of writing in just a few days, which attracted a lot of attention from publics. The tool to spread the video is via Facebook and Twitter, where suddenly makes it a top trending topic. However, this video also received a lot of critics, arguments  and feedbacks from people who is concerned on this topic throughout the Internet. Interactivity and immediacy is the primary element that differentiates what social media and traditional media are. Users frequently browsing the Internet are inclined to rather trust unreliable news than proven facts.

In this article, the author mentioned that there is an article by Craig Silverman on Poynter pointed out that ‘misinformation spread faster and farther than the corrections, especially on social media. It’s what he calls “the law of incorrect tweets”, which says that “Initial, inaccurate information will be retweeted more than any subsequent correction.” According to Pring (2012) research stating that social networking is still the fastest-growing active social media behavious online, increasing from 36% of global internet users to 59% managing their profile on a monthly basis by the end of 2011.

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References:

Hughes, A, Palen, L., Sutton, J., Liu, S., & Vieweg, S. (2008). “Site-seeing” in disaster: An examination of on-line social convergence. In Conference Proceedings of the 5th International ISCRAM Conference, Washington, DC.

Pring, C 2012, 100 more social media statistics for 2012, viewed 5 June 2012, < http://thesocialskinny.com/100-more-social-media-statistics-for-2012/>.