Is Social Media A Social Instrument Of Communication

Media is best defined as an instrument on communication like a radio, a newspaper, television, letter and so on. That being said, social media would be a social instrument of communication. Social media also would be a website that does not just give you the information, but interacts with you while giving you that information. This interaction can be as simple as asking for your comments or letting you vote on an article, or it can be as complex as Flixster recommending movies to you based on the ratings of other people with similar interests. Think of regular media as a one-way street where you can read a newspaper or listen to a report on television, but you have very limited ability to give your thoughts on the matter. Social media, on

According to Kaitlin in Students Journal of Media Literacy Education in 2010, the sites open up different portals through which we get information and create a more diverse news outlet such as television, films, music, the internet, print, billboards, and other pictures are examples of ways we keep up with today’s world and its events. Rather than reading the newspaper, we now have the tendency to rely on our friends on the sites to give us update on the world around us via Facebook posts, tweets and so on. This new diverse of outlets can remove the need to discuss these event in person or face-to-face conversation. When one person tells a story to another person, with the aid of social media suddenly that piece of news was everywhere. Sometimes the piece of news is even incorrect or misinterpreted after it has gone through many different people. This does not always happen intentionally, but just because of different people take news in different ways there is room for errors. By using this medium, the news is easily skewed and it is very hard to distinguish the news whether it is real or not real. Therefore, the need of having real conversation or face-to-face communication is really important because of the trend in sharing information through social media has become increase and this will help people to sit together and discuss the news to know where does it comes

A study done by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) in January 2015 shows that there are some benefits of online learning with the help of social media such as time saving, high flexibility, cheaper in cost, and so on. Again, in reality, there are more unwanted consequences in practicing online learning than the positive achievements. Although it is hard to argue that online learning does serve its function as a fast and cheaper communication very well, the quality of human interaction does not seem to agree in the same way. Encouraging students who are usually still young to rely too much on social media has the potential to make them less social and in this case, social media acts as a new set of communication barrier (Tardanico, 2012). Depending too much on online notes, YouTube online video, and video chatting as a mean to study will extinguish the need to interact face to face, doing hands on exercises in class, and also eliminates the fun of feeling the atmosphere of being in class with friends, which actually refer to the real communication. Without real communication, students would not be able to strengthen their interpersonal skills and this will surely leads to poor quality of human interactions. Therefore, it can be said that the time saving, high flexibility, and cost saving features in online learning through social