The impacts of social networks on the traditional media

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• Publié par: McLuhan-Marshall
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 Revista Latina de Comunicación Social 63 - 2008
Edita: LAboratorio de Tecnologías de la Información y Nuevos Análisis de Comunicación Social Depósito Legal: TF-135-98 / ISSN: 1138-5820 Facultad y Departamento de Ciencias de la Información: Pirámide del Campus de Guajara - Universidad de La Laguna 38071 La Laguna (Tenerife, Canarias; España) Teléfonos: (34) 922 31 72 31 / 41 - Fax: [phone]
Research – How to cite this article – referees' reports – scheduling – metadata – PDF – Creative Commons DOI: 10.4185/RLCS-63-2008-768-294-302-Eng
The impacts of social networks on the traditional media


Francisco Campos Freire, Ph. D. (C.V.). Professor of Journalism at the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of Santiago de Compostela, USC - [e-mail]
Abstract: The rapid and successful debut of the so-called social networks in the last two or three years has alarmed the traditional media. The new social networking phenomenon reaches an audience of millions, increases its advertising revenue, manages user customization, and breaks with some of the barriers of old media organizations. This new via of communication is already used by millions of Internet users as one of the major sources of entertainment and information. This research paper analyzes the structure of eleven global social networks, which provide content in Spanish and other languages, and compares them against the 30 major online newspapers in Spain. The aim is to establish whether the so-called social networks are a new type of media, and a new platform for social relationships, business and post-media content that look more like the audiovisual media than the traditional printed press.
Keywords: convergence; attention economy; post-media; trans-media; social networks; virtual community; online newspapers; traditional media; new communication channel; personalization; information and entertainment.
Summary: 1. Introduction. 2. Justification. 3. Objectives. 4. Methodology. 5. Results. 6. Conclusions. 7. Bibliography.
Translated by Cruz Alberto Martínez Arcos (University of London)
1. Introduction
Internet’s transformation into the main gateway to knowledge, information and entertainment awakens a huge cascade of questions about the role and future of traditional media, whose contents are competing with new information systems. The traditional media are considered cornerstones of the social mediation, the dissemination of information and knowledge, and the democratic impulse. Their importance is unquestionable to such extent that for almost a century society is known as mass media society. Does the incorporation of social networks, considered as new media, enrich and improve the media menu? From the outset, the new, media, or post-media, scenario causes many concerns and uncertainties in spite of its expansion and openness.
Advances in information and communication technologies have adopted new forms of intermediation and interactivity that are reshaping the media space. Social or professional relations and networks established and developed through the Internet constitute a new phase, which some describe as a post-media phase, of the service society which is even more accelerated and in which the attention is more segmented, personalized, instant, diluted, convergent, transparent, flexible, light, conversational, interconnected and oriented to collaboration, participation, and trivialization. The public relations of the media are changing: increasing fragmentation and diluted mediation.
Timoteo (2008) warn us about the new context of relationships between the media and their audiences: “The media go from being an opportunity to a problem. The relations with the media are full of distrust and competition”. Why rely on the media to communicate when the new Internet tools and technologies already allow connections from all to all? Timoteo also describes the effect of communications convergence as “the overwhelming horizontal sector that is present (like money) everywhere in all human activities, which have screen terminals as a references and dominant factor, is supported by several alternative technologies (cable, satellite), is privatized and organized in oligopoly, uses the spectacle as the dominant technique and evolves in parallel with other economic areas”.  !!! "#   $ $%$&    $’ #
  
  


   



2. Justification
Even if we think that they are very recent concepts, because they are a remarkable part of our present society, the notions of knowledge, information, convergence and social network have centuries of history. Their modern genealogy stems from the crisis of medieval European society and the cultural awakening of the Renaissance. The first to emerge was the concept of the knowledge society, associated with the emergence of the European Universities in the 12th century (Burke, 2000: 24), and then the concept of information, in the 15th century, linked to “the genetic code of the mystique of the number” (Mattelart, 2007: 15). The information and communication needs of modern society simultaneously encourage the convergence and the establishment of networks.
The notion of convergence is as broad, generic, ambiguous and elusive as the notions of society of knowledge and information. Like them, convergence comes from the confluence of the humanities with mathematics and has been successively used by different scientists, including the English William Derham (1657-1735) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882), although in the mid 20th century it also jumped to politics, economy, and technology. This jump occurred (Flichy, 1980) at the origin of modern communication industries (telegraph, telephone, radio or film) when electrical, mechanical, chemical, and telecommunications technologies were brought together.
In the last quarter of the 20th century convergence is used to explain syncretically and pragmatically the confluence of information technologies with telecommunications networks and the content circulating within them. But although the causal force of convergence is of a techno-informational nature, its consequences and effects are economic and social. The first convergence was the “technotronic” (1969: Brzezinski), then the “telematics” (1978: Nora-Minc) and almost simultaneously the “digital” (1979: Negroponte). To digitalize information is to encode it into digits and convert it into numbers, in order to manage it in a more effective and complex manner. Among the precursors of this new techno-informational revolution were the English cryptographer Alan Turing (1912-1954) and American engineer Norbert Weiner (1894-1964), both respectively dedicated, during the Second World War, to the task of deciphering the secret information codes of Nazi spies and the precision shooting of the canyons pointing to the Japanese.
The 19th century was the century of the networks: roads, railroads, submarine cables, power lines, and telegraph. The conception of the networks, which extends to the inauguration of the telegraph in France (1794: Paris-Lille), is present in the theory of the social philosopher Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, earl of Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and father of French socialism. Saint-Simonian notions of community and network were used again in the 20th century, after the 1970s, to ease the rigidity of Weber’s model of the administrative bureaucracy. The rectilinear conception (Miguel de Bustos, 2007), which was born in the 19th and 20th centuries with the communications revolution had once again its political transfer to the (global) diplomacy of networks that conceptualizes Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser of American President James Carter.
The current media phenomenon of social networks is a seed germinated after the crisis of growth of the Internet, at the beginning of this century. The psychological need to maintain and nurture contacts emerged from the knowledge, human resources and networks of relationships established between the computer technicians who were involved or affected by the burst of the virtual bubble, and then, gradually, these interpersonal networks grew and expanded into something more serious and organized. With three or four years of experience these social networks have evolved into higher professional organizations, with characteristics of new media. There are already many networks: specialist, of general-interest, open, elitist, of different types and profiles.
General-interest networks divide their expertise into entertainment, generated by users or from third party sources, and information of interest, rated and reviewed. The business networks have also emerged (Shaner- Maznevski, 2007) and there are usually three basic types: entrepreneurs (formed by a growing core group of innovators), closed (with connections and trust) and sponsored. The life cycle of a network is shorter than other conventional media and its audience threshold can only grow up to a certain limit, beyond which it begins to lose profitability (Katz, 2008).
The model of activity - and of course of organization and business - of the traditional media is very different. The media’s information system follows the dictated traditional piloting model: selection, evaluation and control of content. This is not the model that fits, precisely, with the collaborative, open, horizontal and participatory philosophy of "social networking". The so-called Web 2.0, coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2003, was not popularized or characterized as "social networking" or as new collaborative philosophy of doing things until 2005 and 2006. It is a phenomenon of very recent emergence.
The main features of the "social network" are: the concept of community, through the creation of networks