Let’s play “Jeopardy!”
Here’s the answer-question: “Forms of electronic communication (as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages and other content (as videos).”
You can mull it over now or skip to the next paragraph for the answer.
The question-answer: What is Merriam-Webster’s definition of “social media”?
Of course, most current opinion leaders prefer to recognize Facebook and Twitter by more heroic denotations: purveyor of democracy, advocate of creativity, savior of journalism. Events from the ongoing Middle Eastern revolutions to the speakers and workshops within our own Manship School of Mass Communication evidence social media’s seemingly indispensable role in our lives.
The news cycle transmits constant tidbits of information aimed at briefly getting our attention before the next burst of headlines. If this resembles your favorite social networking feeds and this similarity concerns you, it should. News media shouldn’t imitate social media.
Yet the Manship School has embraced these technologies. The Student Media Advertising department regularly sponsors social media workshops, and the Society of Professional Journalists recently hosted NBC newswriter and Web editor Barbara Raab’s “Real World Social Media” seminar.
Raab presented an impressive YouTube video of social media statistics, but the deluge of facts rendered itself meaningless and left me disoriented, not enlightened.
Unfortunately, our news culture often follows suit.
She forecasted that the term “social media” will soon disappear — it’s simply the new news media.
At the risk of sabotaging my future employment opportunities, I’ll join the social media cynics who beg to differ.
In “Amusing Ourselves To Death,” Neil Postman’s dystopian prediction of the entertainment age, he argued the best — and only — thing TV can offer is junk. Likewise, the fast-paced, bite-sized world of social media promotes trivia and undermines genuine journalism.
The incompatibilities between news and social media result from their intrinsic function.
Theoretically, neutral media mold to users’ individual purpose, and many people view social networking sites as altruistic vehicles for self expression and democracy.
But as we know, member content and information is often sold to advertisers and used for the site’s own gains. As the New York Times reported, the infamous privacy-killer Facebook has remained mum about its role in Middle East rebellions. Ostensibly, this is for the revolutionaries’ safety, but the company also knows it pays to be apolitical.
Another Times article compared the blurring media genres to feudalism: “Social networks and traditional media may all seem like different animals, but as advertising, the mother’s milk of all media, flows toward social and amateur media, low-cost and no-cost content is becoming the norm.”
We post on these sites under the euphoria of creative freedom. In reality, these are unpaid contributions to serfdom.
Social media cannot save the world — or the news industry — without altering the true meaning of journalism: thorough, thought-provoking coverage of newsworthy stories that aren’t always scintillating reads.
If traditional news media reject social media, the industry just might die. But it is ailing enough already from the tabloid mentality, which social media only exacerbate. News outlets must resist the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach and stick to truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Any tool driven by profit cannot be a friend to creativity, freedom or information. Ideals like privacy and objectivity are sacrificed for the sake of what sells.
The use of buzz-generators might be an effective business strategy, but it isn’t a panacea or substitute for real news.
The irony is I’ll be posting this anti-social media column on Facebook and Twitter. Modern journalism seeks to reach readers on their own turf.
But what happened to the literate masses who actively sought out information and willingly paid those who gathered it?
Kelly Hotard is a 19-year-old mass communication junior from Picayune, Miss. Follow her on Twitter @TDR_khotard.
 
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Contact Kelly Hotard at [email protected]