Social Media: An Emerging Conundrum?

Abstract

The advent of citizen journalism in the terrain of traditional journalism practice has certainly raised some pertinent issues worth examining scholarly. Citizen journalism is a way of making everyone a reporter even without training and being given access to push out anything to the public arena all in the name of informing others about latest events around. Of course, that is a bit of reporting in its loose sense. Citizen journalism, through the use of blogging, is a fall-out of the social media innovations that have revolutionised the information industry just like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc are used as search engines for social interaction. This leads to the concept of social networking discussed in this paper. However, the concerns that these innovations have sprung up –better termed challenges –in the field of journalism and social life generally are what this paper focuses on. The paper observes that social networking is like a two-edged sword which gives impetus to media democratization and liberalization, as in citizen journalism, but at the same time, tends to erode ethical values of journalism. In other spheres of its application, the challenges posed by social networking are enormous just as the prospects are alluring. It is here that the society needs to be careful in finding ways to bring the new media under regulation because they evidently have the potential of being counter-productive to the interest and wellbeing of the society.