R1: Social Media as a News Platform (revised)

There is no questioning that currently technology drives our society, so it is no surprise that social media has become intertwined in many aspects of our daily lives. In Baym’s “Making New Media Make Sense,” Baym discusses a few discourses about new media; these are technological determinism, social construction of technology, social shaping of technology, and domestication of technology.  The first describes the technology as having agents acting on it, humans, and within it, the coding within the technology.  The second looks at how humans incorporate technology into society based on our needs, and the third is a middle ground of the two.  Baym describes the social shaping of technology as, “People, technologies, and institutions all have power to influence the development and subsequent use of technology.”  Domestication of technology, finally, refers to the technologies that once were revolutionary, but now have become commonplace, and possibly under appreciated. These ideas give us the frameworks to use to analyze new media as they emerge in society. 

          The new era of smartphones and the explosion of social media’s influence on our daily lives is truly remarkable. Most everyone, specifically the cohort of Millennials, is guilty of being engulfed by their cell phone for a big chunk of their down time, and although people are criticized for it, there are many upsides to the social media boom. The American Press Institute performed research in 2015 on millennials and their use of social media sites. Of the 91 percent of millennials that use Facebook for any reason at all, “seven in 10 click on and regularly read or watch news stories or headlines posted by other people” (API, 2015). 

This is a great statistic to use when thinking about the framework of social shaping of technology. Social Media was created with the goal of connecting people to one another, but from this one could argue that social media is changing the way that the average person receives their news.
         In addition to being generally more informed, we may be able to glean from this study that millennials may be shying away from a particular bias that they historically could have held from their family background or upbringing. In the study, regarding those asked about what kind of articles they explore, “70 percent of Millennials say that their social media feeds are composed of a relatively even mix of similar and different opinions to their own” (API, 2015). And of those 70 percent, 73 percent of those people are willing to, and do, explore those other opinions freely. 

The concept of technological determinism in the sense that, “the technology is conceptualized as an external agent that acts upon and changes society” (Baym), truly reflects what is going on here in the study. People are exposed to different opinions that challenge their own, and most people are embracing that and exploring new ideas. Further examination of this finding with Baym’s second discourse framework of social construction of technology may be even more useful to us. The time that we live in is filled with controversy and groups of people felling disrespected, and if social media can help open people’s minds to opinions that challenge their own, then maybe we, as a people, can change and become more tolerant of others and ease the tensions that seem to be pulling us apart. Whether we see that social media does bring about this change remains to be seen, but this example of our technology leaving an imprint of itself upon its’ users seems like it may not be such a bad thing after all.

Sources:
Am, Published 03/16/15 12:01. "How Millennials use and control social media." American Press                       Institute. N.p., 01 Oct. 2015. Web. 07 Mar. 2017.

Baym, Nancy, “Making New Media Make Sense,” (PDF)