New forms, Old traditions, False sense of control: Mediatizing events in the new age of new media. By Ashwin N Any television we watch today have accepted and adopted social media as a norm and a form of communication with its viewers. Be it news channels, reality shows or TV soaps all of them have a presence on social media web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube or Instagram. Often it appears as if viewers are directly interacting with the television through tweets of Facebook messages. This direct conversation with TV anchors or executives would give the viewer a sense of interaction which makes the mundane activity of watching TV interesting. If we notice this with respect to news channels, tweets and facebook updates are considered as news items. It becomes a form of citizen journalism. Selection of tweets for reporting and their news worthyness is directly related to the political economy and dominant discourses at a given time. However do TV channels actually reflect the discourses that persist in society expressed through twitter? If we look at the tweets appearing on TV and compare them to all the tweets on the given day we can understand how events are mediatized using new media tools. By flashing tweets on television, the selected information in retweeted to many more people who are perhaps out of twitter itself. For instance recent events like communal riots in Vadodra or floods in different part of the country had a biased converge on mainstream media, they chose not to pick news based on tweets depicting ground realities. But used other tweets to cover up these events, like prime ministers visit to US or images of Indian army in good light. A study of how twitter feed is used by news channels to their convenience without reflecting truly the ground situation, can give a understanding of the relation of new and traditional media. The study tries to argue that news channels give a false sense of democratic participation in the process of making news (exploiting the discourses around new media). Yet they function as traditionally as they did before social media websites.While social media websites come with their set of drawbacks, nonetheless they become useful tools in the process of mediatizing events.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 08:38:41 +0000
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