Social Media

I work in a small office and generally, we take time during lunch to peruse Facebook and Twitter. Occasionally we share things we see through those mediums and it occurred to me the other day that I get most of my news from Facebook postings. I do look at my local paper online, but I really can't stand their website, so I tend to look at their phone or tablet app which gives me the news articles without the annoying pop-up ads.  I also listen to KYW, but it is in the morning when I am getting ready so my concentration is not there.  

I thought that learning things through social media was akin to learning all my news from the slanted Fox News, but I think that the reality is that the news that I get is more varied; more subject to truth and opinion from people I trust.  I don't really think it is that bad to get information on what is happening around me via that medium. Since I was a communications major in college I learned that Marshal McLuhan said "the medium is the message".  It was introduced in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. Hot medium, such as movies make more of an impact on the viewer than cold medium, like television.  I would suspect that Facebook and Twitter would be considered a cold medium, one that can loose part of the message due to the distractions possible when viewing television.  I wonder what he  would say about social media today. But the fact of the matter is that social media, cold or warm, engages people to connect and opinion.

I know this medium has a permanent place in our culture now and I would not be surprised to find that others learn about what is going on through their own "friends". The people we connect with through social media have become our reporters and editors in the world around us.  We trust their content, probably more than the content from paid media, because we have more of a connection with them and trust them.   

Acceptance? Not so much

This whole Trayvon Martin case has gotten a huge amount of attention in the community in my area.  If you are not familiar with this case, a young African-American male, 17 years old, was shot and killed after a small scuffle by a self appointed Town Watch person in Florida.  The young man was wearing a hoodie, unarmed and carrying only a cell phone, an iced tea, and a package of Skittles.  The Town Watch person probably assumed he was up to no good simply based on his appearance, his clothing, and the fact he was a black youth in an upper class white area.

Social Media played a big part in spreading the news of this case.  There was so much about the case through the people who are connected to me on Facebook that I thought this was a local person until I read about it through the links I found on Google.  The amount of hits on Google are so many that it is hard to locate the first newspaper article that just gave the facts about what had happened.  In many cases the impact of the social media has become an important voice in determining what issues become important.  The social commentary that one hears from this communication tool is important because it points to how people are responding to an event, and it demonstrates the fact that even 100 plus years after the Civil War, race relations in this country have not progressed that far.  There is still a huge divide between the blacks and the whites and now the whites and the browns. 

Many branches of Christianity, often spoken of by the Religious Right, tout acceptance.   But their version of acceptance is usually lip service to actual reality.  If there really was acceptance in this country, there would be no situations where people shoot and ask questions later. I blame that on the spread of fear largely pointed at the African-American and Hispanic community by the Fox News followers.  Their terror mongering rants are what have perpetuated situations like this because they simply cannot accept someone dressed like Trayvon in a location where people supposedly do not dress like that; they cannot accept someone different from themselves.