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The Pros and Cons of Getting your News from Social Media

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If I ask people about their most-used platform for daily news, majority of them are likely to speak of social media platforms. This is the reality of today. Due to the emergence of digitalization and an immense growth of technology, people of all age-groups are heavily relied on websites like Facebook and Twitter to get their daily dose of updates from all around the world. News channels are seen investing in mobile applications to keep up with the pace of technology and provide timely updates to the readers.

All of this is giving people a power. One, no longer, has to switch on their television set to become aware of the latest debates in the world, and nor do they have to wait around for the arrival of any newspapers. One can actively broadcast news and watch it unfold without any lapse of time.

So, all in all, traditional platforms and social media have become two powerful forces which are working towards a common goal of spreading awareness as efficiently as possible, despite the differences.

But, every power comes with a responsibility and its own set of pros and cons. As we already discussed the pros above, let us now look at some of the disadvantages posed by such a change.

“Half knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance”

This becomes significant in witnessing the relations between the users today and their news-reading habits. Through the help of status updates, shared posts and various 2-minute videos, we sure know what the latest news is all about and have a general idea or an overview of the specific situation; but do we really make an effort to know the whole story?

We know that Donald Trump is contesting in the US elections but do we even know anything about him? Do we understand why he’s being criticised by so many people? He said something about Muslims, right? But what did he say, why did he say so, and what is so wrong about it- do we ever question that?

Also, most of the times, when we come across a piece of news through the social media, we are so constantly involved in doing something else that we are likely to get distracted easily. There is also a fat chance of the article that you read, which is slowly forming your opinion, being factually incorrect because of its autonomy provided by the social media and a lack of stringent fact-checker.

So, somewhere, I believe, reading the headlines in our notification bars alone is creating a false sense of security among us. It sure helps us seem not-so-dumb in a social gathering because, “hey, at least I know there was some movie which was in news for being censored” but this is soon going to harm us in the longer run.

So, use the power, wisely. While the internet is a wonderful place with social media making everything accessible for everyone, do not run away from your own efforts. Read extensively from different authenticated platforms and then form an opinion. After all, knowledge is power, right?

Image credits: www.thehindubusinessline.com

Nishita Agarwal

[email protected]

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Uncategorized

Oscars 2016: Trending on Twitter

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From Chris Rock’s monologue about the lack of diversity in Hollywood to Leonardo DiCaprio winning the Oscar (can we say FINALLY?!), the 2016 Academy Awards certainly had several memorable moments which understandably sent the world wide web crazy- whether it be through the start of new memes, or the end of others (you know what I mean).

The Twitterverse once again proved itself as the place to be for anyone who wants an immediate explosion of a diverse range of reactions to whatever’s going. We present to you some of the best and most popular tweets about the 2016 Oscars:

1. When Twitter loved Chris Rock’s monologue about the lack of diversity in Hollywood:

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2. Chrissy Teigen was the queen of audience reactions when Chris Rock brought out Stacy Dash, the actress who has criticized the Black Lives Matter movement and the Black History Month, who wished the audience… a happy Black History Month. Awkward much?!

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3. Lady Gaga’s powerful performance of her Oscar-nominated song ‘Til It Happens To You’ with survivors of sexual assault onstage made the audience and the Twitterverse emotional. She was introduced by Joe Biden, who has been instrumental in promoting the White House’s “It’s On Us” campaign, aimed at ending sexual assault

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4. When Mad Max: Fury Road went on a mini-spree and the memes, of course, followed:
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5. And of course, when  Leonardo DiCaprio finally won the Oscar for his sixth nomination. His win nearly broke the internet and definitely broke a Twitter record for the most-tweeted minute ever to take place during an Oscars telecast. There were more than 440,000 tweets per minute posted when he accepted his award, as opposed to 255,000 per minute when Ellen DeGeneres took the legendary Oscar selfie in 2014, which was the previous record holder. This tweet accurately captures our reaction:
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One of the most important tweet was perhaps that of Bette Midler’s before the ceremony even began and captured what many believe was wrong about the biggest Oscar moment of the night:
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Oh well. The good, the bad and the controversial, all found place on Twitter during the Oscars telecast and it sure made for an interesting feed!
Featured Image Credits: oscars.org
Shubham Kaushik
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Top Picks

What’s Trending: Top Twitter Moments that made up 2015

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Ever since it gained popularity in the 2010s, Twitter has been the place to be on the interweb. Quick, concise and relatively direct (you can direct tweets at official celebrity accounts!), everyone from the Prime Minister of the country to the fashion blogger you follow has an account, even if they’re not that active. Recently, Twitter has also emerged as the place to talk about social issues and calamities around the globe. People use it to start campaigns and direct attention towards important issues, as well as to run updates accounts (kinda like fan-pages but with stalkerishly-accurate everyday updates) for every possible celebrity.

2015 was a landmark year that changed quite a few aspects of life as we know it, and you bet Twitter was all over it. Here’s the most loved, popular, trending and retweeted posts of 2015:

1. Most Retweeted:

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The One Direction fandom reigned supreme amongst the retweeters as the most retweeted tweet of the year emerged to be Harry Styles’ message after the news of Zayn Malik leaving the boyband broke. Other One Direction related tweets also figured amongst the top, including Zayn Malik’s tweet of support after the band’s single ‘Drag Me Down’ dropped.

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The tweet about marriage equality by the official account of the President of the United States, and Caitlyn Jenner introducing herself to the world, were also amongst the most retweeted of the year.

2. India:

Twitter India also released the annual analysis of tweets that proved to be the most popular in the country.

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Shahrukh Khan’s selfie with and tweet about Zayn Malik from the Asian Awards emerged as the most retweeted tweet in the country, having been RT’d over 149,000 times.

Amitabh Bacchan’s Twitter Handle remained the most followed with around 18.6 million followers, and Shahrukh Khan and Prime Minister Modi’s ranked in after him.

 india twitter trends

The top twitter trend for India in 2015 was #IPL as the T20 cricket tournament returned and saw a country known for its cricket-frenzy discuss it in over 9 million tweets. Other top trends included #SelfieWithDaughter, which started from a Modi-led campaign in Haryana to emphasise the importance of the girl child, and #BiharResults.

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The twitter account of the Modi campaign Make in India became the first non-US brand to create its own Twitter emoji.

 Hashtags related to Chennai Floods (#ChennaiRains, #ChennaiFloods and #ChennaiRainHelp) emerged as a platform for the local residents to communicate and were used to give important information about the situation and in coordinating relief measures.

3. Important Global moments:

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Tweets of solidarity flooded Twitter post terror attacks in Paris and other countries with the hashtags #JeSuisCharlie and #PrayForParis emerging as most popular.

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#BlackLivesMatter became ones of the most important social movements on social media, and it all started on Twitter with people speaking out against widespread cases of racially-biased police brutality in the US.

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The world celebrated a landmark move in ensuring more acceptance for the LGBT community through the #LoveWins hashtag after the US Supreme Court judgment that declared that state-level bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, thus making same-sex marriage legal nationwide.

In another heart-touching moment, the Twitter community rallied for refugees from the Middle East and Africa seeking asylum in Europe to not be shunned with the hashtag #RefugeesWelcome.

One Direction emerged as the top music-related trend in 2015, and Ariana Grande as the top-trending celebrity. On the front of World Affairs, #GOPDebate and #Obama figured amongst the top trends.

4. 2015 for DU Beat on Twitter:

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We at DU Beat believe in connecting with the world through the most efficient mediums, and Twitter is definitely an effective way of doing that. In 2015, we further increased our Twitter activity, with more regular tweets and instant updates from all the Festivals we covered in DU and outside. Standing currently at more than 2760 followers (with the count increasing everyday!), our biggest Twitter moments in 2015 were all the attention we got during the SRCC Youth Conference, and retweeting of our tweets during Mood Indigo 2015, the annual cultural festival of IIT Bombay by people as influential as Shaan and organisations as well-known as Nescafe.

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The international DJ Borgeous also retweeted a tweet about his performance.

Featured Image Credits: Twitter

All images in the article: Official Twitter Accounts

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DUB Speak

The Ups and Downs of a Social Media Internship

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So many of us take up a virtual internship for some reason. Maybe you have entrance exams, or you are occupied with some other work or obligation. And more often than not, the internship job description entails work in the social media department. We’d love to believe that social media is the future, and with the jobs in social media becoming serious every passing day, it is only obvious that many of us are considering a career in this field.

Here’s a quick look at the pros and cons of a social media internship.

Pros:

  1. Quantifiable performance enables you to learn faster while working. We can always assess performances through metrics and analytics such as reach, views, likes, retweets, favourite etc. It becomes easier to learn on your own when you have insight into what works and what doesn’t
  2. You become a pro at knee-jerk reactions. The business environment is more dynamic than ever. Same goes for social media. And a social media internship prepares you well to jump at every opportunity, what with unleashing hashtags when you see something trending on Twitter.
  3. Data analysis becomes a constant job. And sans the agonizing theory of statistics, you get to learn the real world application of mean, mode, median. In an attempt to constantly gauge what works and what doesn’t, you understand the tricks of data analysis faster than any textbook can ever teach you.
  4. You get to be the cool one- from creating memes, trolling the celebrity you dislike, or even the healthy banter that companies nowadays engage in- you get to bring the cool quotient into the otherwise dull and drab corporate affairs.

Cons

  1. No kidding here, but the “glued-to-devices-24*7” isn’t really glamorous. It is all back aches and tired eyes at the end of the day, and you may as well just crash into your bed, with a feeling of hopelessness at yet another unproductive day, when you cannot see the results.
  2. You need to be personally invested and detached simultaneously. Haters gonna hate, and social media makes it so easy for them to lash out on you, whether as a brand or as a person.
  3. The constant urge to stay updated leads to Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), and life becomes monotonous with scheduling and keeping a tab on insights. Consider this: – Tweeting from the wrong account is a legitimate fear, and one typo can be the end of it all.
  4. You are painfully aware that social media is a superficial platform and can never really be fully representative of the real world.

 

Weigh the pros and cons for yourself, and decide if you’re up for a social media adventure!

 

Featured Image Graphic by Kritika Narula

Kritika Narula

[email protected]

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Offbeat

Offbeat Careers: Social Media Management

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A social media manager is responsible for monitoring and posting to all social media outlets as well as interacting with and growing a company’s audience. The ultimate goal is to raise awareness of the brand, company, product or a person online while driving traffic online, offline or both. Depending on the job, a social media manager is typically associated with brand building through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, MySpace and corporate blogging.

We all know how important word of mouth is, and social networking is like word of mouth on steroids. As a business, it’s vital to tap into and join online conversations not only about your brand, but also those about your competitors, your industry and your areas of expertise.

Even if you haven’t launched an outbound social media strategy, it helps to keep a pulse on what people are saying — good or bad — about your company, competitors and major trends. And, by representing your company in a positive, authentic way, you can build credibility for your expertise and business and link to customers and prospects quickly. You can also help mitigate damage should negative conversations about your company emerge by quickly responding to complaints.

Also, contrary to popular belief social media management is not only about management but also writing and analyzing. It is an amalgamation of journalism and advertizing. It offers a career in creating content in multiple places, such as a blog, Twitter, a Facebook page, etc.; monitor and scan the views, decide what comments to approve, and respond to replies on these sites, scanning Twitter followers for conversations you may want to join, or checking your RSS reader subscriptions for relevant articles and new ideas. Checking Google Alerts to see when and where your business is mentioned on the Web and creating and monitoring a community and topics on a site such as Facebook or LinkedIn

However, social media management in India is still at a nascent stage and not many colleges or institutes offer it as a course. Having said that, there is a lot to explore in this sector and understanding social media at the root level is enough to kick start your career. A lot has to be learned and figured out on the job.  Getting internships at a digital advertizing firm or an online news publication is the best place to start if someone is interested in a career in social media management. Nirali Hingwala, the Content Head at SocialSamosa.com, a website catering to Indian Social media news says, “Initially Social Media Management doesn’t pay off well, because its still evolving, there is lack of good talent in this field with no proper training as the discipline is still not taught in the Indian universities. There are only private courses.”

It’s a great time to break into a social media career. The importance of social media is becoming clear to more companies every day. This means social media managers are in high demand and the market is wide open.

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DUB Speak

Snorting the Social Media Drug

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Picture source:  www.business2community.com

 

Think about the last time you read an important piece of information. More often than not, it comes from the status updates of your numerous friends on Facebook. When you put forward an opinion, a lot of it might have drawn inspiration from your favourite tweets on the same subject. Instead of flipping through the pages of your neatly organised notebook, you would rather zoom into the picture you saved of your college timetable on your phone. Information is now merely a click away, giving people from even the most remote corners of the world an opportunity to communicate easily and efficiently. However, a majority of us are now crippled by our continuous dependency on these virtual crutches.

In the light of the latest crackdown on social connectivity, consisting of the government restricting messaging to a meagre 5 per day due to the threat towards people from the North-East did not sit too well with a society that is completely in sync with the social networking era. Thus, what actually began as a somewhat reasonable ban to prevent rumours spreading on a wide scale is now being seen as another excuse by our country’s leaders to crack the whip on our freedom of expression, be it through the SMS or the more dangerous threat of control over sites like Facebook and Twitter. Agreed, a simple ban on texting will in no way stop malicious stories leaking into the public domain. However, what is also evident is the fact that the lack of proper texting facilities didn’t lead to the end of the world a good four months before December 21st, 2012. Life continued in the same fashion as it did when the rights of texting were more liberal. When the Telecom Authority of India had declared a ban of 100 SMSs a day, so many users received a reality check when they learnt of their addiction to a piece of electronic genius. However, just as we gradually got accustomed to this new regulation and our tired fingers were fortunate enough to be subjected to marginally less typing, the new ban for a short period of only 12 days is too insignificant a sacrifice being paid for the uproar it has caused.

With the messaging limit being later extended from 5 to 20, and finally the lift of the ban, social networking sites immediately saw the appearance of memes and statuses proclaiming happiness almost equal to a nation winning its first world cup. The excitement of being able to send 15 more messages a day seemed palpable as almost everyone had their phones out the next day, furiously typing as they stared into a mini screen that flickered with notifications received from their equally enthusiastic recipients. However, the comment that made me stop and re-evaluate how dependant we really have become to these social platforms was when someone casually remarked, “I don’t know about people with those outdated phones, but almost everyone has a Blackberry or a smart phone now. That keeps us connected through BBM, Whatsapp and Facebook. This ban on texts is just a minor glitch,” said one such addict with a beeping Blackberry in hand.

The number of times we refrain from using our electronic gadgets for practically everything can be counted off our fingers. When you start working on your super important project one day before the deadline, you thank the Google and Wikipedia gods for showering their blessings on you. Our internalisation of technology is evident from the use of phases like ‘I googled that information’ or ‘I saw that on her wall last week,’ while only a couple of decades ago, walls referred to those rectangular combinations of cement and plaster of Paris that form the outline of every structure. As for the future, this incessant need to be constantly linked to everyone around only seems to be growing as social media spreads its branches and reaches out to every single entity within and beyond its periphery. Social networking and technology provide us with an easier and more efficient lifestyle, but that doesn’t alter the reality that if our parasitic existence continues, we might just be witness to the dawn of a Matrix-inspired end to our civilisation.

 

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