Development of Social Media

Abstract

This chapter begins by describing the climate of heroic hopefulness surrounding the emergence of social media: that it would democratise the sources of information available to the public and put an end to the stifling and self-interested processes by which professional mass media robbed the people of a truthful worldview. Matters did not turn out like that, but even so social media brought great benefits, as well as great curses, to the public discourse. One of the greatest benefits was its capacity to provide eye-witnesses to events in real time and on a scale that was unimaginable under pre-digital conditions. One of its greatest curses was that it unleashed on the public a chaotic mass of material the provenance of which was not only dubious but in some cases directly damaging to democratic processes. The professional mass media initially joined in this Babel but gradually came to realise that it could play a complementary role by exerting the disciplines of journalism upon it. The Wikileaks War Logs case is used to illustrate this complementarity. That case showed that if professional mass media were to verify social media material, minimise foreseeable harms from it, assess its public interest and provide context, it could vastly enlarge the public’s knowledge of what was happening in the world. Social media also exerted a degree of accountability on the media that was unprecedented. While this was healthy in principle, in practice it exposed journalists—especially female journalists—to trolling that was often misogynistic and sometimes violent. Professional mass media also had to negotiate a relationship with social media such that consumers of professional mass media could be sure that accepted journalistic standards had been applied to material they published. And it had to do this in circumstances where social media platforms had drained much of the financial lifeblood from newspapers, radio and television. The chapter concludes with an argument that healthy democracy needs both social and professional mass media, but that optimal benefits will only accrue to society when the relationship has reached a greater degree of maturity than it has so far.