Michael Jackson died this week. Now personally I didn’t really like his music, and I think the best thing he ever did was the Thriller music video, but that isn’t important. What is important is the way I found out Michael Jackson died. I knew he went into the hospital from CNN, but when I was on Twitter I kept seeing RIP MJ trends, so I looked into it and TMZ was reporting that he had died. CNN wasn’t even reporting it. It’s amazing that blogs and social media are traveling faster than the news can.
Will we ever get to the point where the news will be useless all together? I believe so. In Iran journalists are banned from recording the abuse going on, meanwhile people with cellphone cameras are recording the things going on. If it weren’t for these ordinary citizens then the world would have no idea. Social media is still a relatively new concept that only emerged in the last few years, but with sites like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, and so many others out there, I think that the future of the media is the people. Cellphones are getting higher resolution everyday, and I think the higher resolution they get, it will only lead to the more people who will use it to show the world around them.
I think that the mass media will have to adopt to new circumstances and that they’ll find a way to do so. Personally I wouldn’t miss any of them, only some of the more intelligent like Guardian or Le monde diplomatique. But I wouldn’t really put them in the mass media group anyway.
I also think that social media is a new trend that will be expanding with every year. That’s probably the future of the media. We’ll see how it developes within next couple of years.