Media And Communication

1. Social Media Industries

Social media, Facebook, in particular, has become part of the culture. Social media has united almost everyone across the globe using a single web. Individuals worldwide use social media to partake in all manner of tasks, desires, and needs. For example, businesses and organizations use social media to get to a specific size of the population. Social media poses a significant risk to individuals across the universe, especially how it is shared and interpreted. Misleading information spreads at a faster rate on Facebook. For example, fake news (this can be post-election news). According to Vaidhyanathan, Facebook, in particular, has various functions that can bring adverse social effects.

Facebook as operates as a "pleasure machine" to its users, thus providing inexpensive maintenance of relationships (specifically long-distance relationships), engagements, group participation, attainment of new friends, and several other things (Vaidhyanathan, 2018).  In this case, social media provide low-level feedback that is both good and bad, which invites its users to come back time and again to receive an award. Vaidhyanathan advocate that the amount of users receiving the award is in high number. However, this can cause serious harm to individuals since it's a manipulative cycle damaging the world and the capability of processing novel knowledge with any substantial sum of interactions or beliefs.

Individuals post information, pictures, and videos of others or themselves on social media. The information posted can either be authentic or inauthentic. The information posted can either be used by the government, commercial entities, and several others to create a web of near-constant observations that can taint people's characters and destroy lives (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). Therefore social media is seen as a 'surveillance machine.'

Social media can be used to examine the intensification of community social responsibility, beliefs, or the social free enterprise at large. For example, social media platforms have been used to stimulate benevolence among their users. However, this belief can invite several disasters that can harm individuals in society at large. The owners of these platforms have tried to curve the platforms' negative effects by suggesting that they are flaws that can be fixed during updates.

Consequently, social media plays an essential role in protests, politics, and revolutions. For example, the absence of transparency and responsibility for the advertisement of political issues presented to a few sections of the population is addressed at length, as is the stage's use and involvement in circulating exciting information from autocrats and their follower's world (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). For instance, the Brexit in the United Kingdom and the United States of America President Donald Trump, posing profound perception into the preceding backgrounds and communal conflict that Facebook's systems knowledgeably misused to the contentment of both crusades.  It's evident enough that data collected in social media has severe effects on society at large.

The public has to take several steps to claim what social media has stripped from society. By looking at possible solutions to the adverse social effects of social media. For example, media literacy is an essential tool that will improve social media's adverse social effects. Media literacy can be used to educate a large population to distinguish between good content and destructive content. Additionally, several governing involvements beyond better privacy protections will substantially change how Facebook operates (Vaidhyanathan, 2018). The social media platform has no enticement to change; thus, any effort to lift off the Facebook boycott will be unimportant and counter-productive. To achieve a healthy political and social life, it is essential to recognize the damage social media has caused and movements to get beyond their spell. If many people are encouraged to put Facebook to its proper use, conceivably merely as a social and family contact, somewhat than political information or engagement, we can train ourselves out of the habit. It is essential to know the addictive potential of social media sites; it might be challenging to exist on these platforms; thus, anytime a negative feeling is felt, it is essential to disconnect. Consequently, it is essential to strengthening schools, libraries, and other civic organizations that will offer a more affluent community and knowledge engagement to guarantee a healthy public culture. However, these implementations might promote negativity in terms of fair usage of social media to promote a positive culture in society at large.

2. News and Automation

The use of automated news generation from organized data has traumatized up the journalism industry, more specifically since the related press, one of the world's principal and leading firm news organizations has begun to automate its periodical commercial earnings reports. Thus once established, automation produces several news stories for a particular subject in a quicker, affordable, and accurate manner than any human journalist (Ford, & Hutchinson, 2019, pp. 1013-1031). This keeps installing fears among journalists, with the belief that automated content invention will ultimately eradicate newsroom employments. However, practitioners view technology as a way to enhance the quality of the news. Automation keeps changing the reception and practice of journalists worldwide as companies across the globe keep creating software solutions for producing automated news—for example, Forbes and the New York Times. The technology is still in its early phase; however, automation has arrived in newsrooms, and it's likely to stay for an extended period.

The news media organizations are trialing with new newsbots generation that moves past programmed news delivery according to informal format within private messaging facilities. To create the newsbot, journalists' skills reports and replies to user inquiries that impressionist an honest discussion amid a journalist and user. The journalist is trialing with communication styles that redirect the journalist's specific personalities—for example, the traits of news chatbot made by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Automation and public journalists' expeditions into social media service conveyance shape the links between the audience and the public service anchors (Ford, & Hutchinson, 2019, pp. 1013-1031). For a segment of the audience that utilizes it, the approachable newsbot contrasts constructively with their preceding involvement with news and the reporters who create it. The journalist of public service who operates the bot, in turn, utilizes the bot to attempt reaching a new audience by trying with a more comfortable, friendly affiliation with national users. The apparently "intellectual" (but very much human-crafted) newsbot is the tool through which this new association is being copied.

Automation is necessary when producing or creating monotonous stories for repetitive subjects for which more accurate, clean, and organized data is available. However, it cannot cover topics for which no organized facts are accessible and is problematic when facts quality is low (Ford, & Hutchinson, 2019, pp. 1013-1031). The practice and reception of journalists keep changing due to automation since the vital force of automated journalism is always increasing accessibility of organized facts and news; the aim of the organization to reduce the cost and increase the news quantity.

Automation is less likely to strengthen journalism because it dependant on facts and assumptions, both of which are issues with errors and biases. Thus, automation can only generate outcomes that are unpredicted, unintentional, and encompass errors. Additionally, automation cannot ask questions, elaborate on new occurrences or start causality and are therefore restricted in their capability to discern society and accomplish journalistic responsibilities, such as forming public opinion and orientation (Ford, & Hutchinson, 2019, pp. 1013-1031). The quality of automated news writing is sub-standard to human writing but probable to grow, specifically as regular language cohort technology developments.

Subsequently, it is up to the journalist to develop skills that automation cannot perform, such as interviewing, investigative, and in-depth analysis reporting. Automation and human journalism are likely to be integrated and create a "man-machine marriage" (Ford, & Hutchinson, 2019, pp. 1013-1031). Automation is probable to substitute journalists who purely cover monotonous topics. However, it will produce new employment within the improvement of automated produced news.

3. Disinformation

New digital technology has worsened disinformation concerns by forming platforms where everyone's interpretations and opinions can be promoted and published without a thorough review of whether the information is authentic or false. For example, Wikipedia is a global encyclopedia in 250 languages. Anyone can add or edit Wikipedia. The wiki goal is to create the totality of human knowledge accessible to everyone around the world at no cost (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Depending on an individual's knowledge, it is either noble testing of the internet age or terrible personification of relativism and scholarly standards. Getting information from Wikipedia is very easy; however, it contains several mistakes of vandalism.

Additionally, new digital media technology has released innovative journalism performances that have enabled new forms of communication and wider universal reach than any point in human history. Disinformation is commonly referred to as fake news, which keeps affecting how individuals understand everyday development. Most people obtain news through online sources using, for example, mobile phones. Disinformation is produced by several outlets that parade themselves as authentic media sites but broadcast misleading or false accounts intended to mislead the public (Van Dijck et al., 2018). Disinformation is intensified and spread faster through fake accounts or automation. News bots are non-threatening, and critical sites like Facebook prohibited bots and strive to eliminate them; however, there are social bots that are mischievous articles intended precisely to harm (Dee, 2007). These bots misinform, abuse, and influence social media dialogue with reports, junk, malware, propaganda, defamation, or even just noise

The disinformation problem can be curved without undermining digital media benefits. For example, the government, consumers, and businesses need to work together to solve this challenge in an open and independent system. In this case, the government should encourage news learning and durable professional journalism to its citizen since the public requires journalists to help them make sense of the complex developments. Also, the government should evade restrictions on news media's capability to cover the news. Additionally, the news industry must offer high standard journalism to create communal trust and correct misleading news without formalizing them.

Consequently, technology companies should capitalize on tools that can detect fake information and decrease financial inducements for those that benefit from misleading information, and enhance online responsibility. Learning institutions should make facts about broadcast literacy a high priority. Finally, people should follow various information sources and be diverse with what they read and watch (Van Dijck et al., 2018). It is also essential to support online accountability through policies and implementations against false accounts. This makes it easier for individuals to be held answerable to whatever they post or circulate online.

Additionally, this prevents an individual from hiding false names when they create misleading information and activities in social media accounts.  Therefore, the government, news media, users, and platforms should be accountable for moderate disinformation challenges. This suggests that everyone must battle the menace of misleading information; this runs from supporting investigative journalists, reducing capital incentives for false information, and enhancing digital literacy among society members.

Reference

Van Dijck, J., Poell, T. and De Waal, M., 2018. The platform society: Public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press.

Vaidhyanathan, S., 2018. Antisocial Media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press.

Ford, H. and Hutchinson, J., 2019. Newsbots that mediate journalist and audience relationships. Digital Journalism, 7(8), pp.1013-1031.

Dee, J., 2007. All the news that’s fit to print out. The New York Times, 1.

Kumar, Sangeet, and Radhika Parameswaran. "Charting an itinerary for postcolonial communication and media studies." Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 347-358.