The Importance of Social Media

Part of my job at The New School involves creating strategic presences for the university on a variety of social media sites. This work involves a great deal of consideration for the nature and importance of social media, and the ways it has influenced how we think, feel, and interact.

The unique importance of social media in broadcasting information will play a large role in this project. The fact that social media sites are free, immediate, and far-reaching makes them an important platform for the quick and easy dissemination of important information. The regular daily news cycle has been replaced by up-to-the-minute man on scene coverage of important events, including protests. These observations color the public perception of events (for those technologically invested follow them) in more concrete ways than we might like to admit. The ease with which a story can be spread through a note posted on Facebook, a status update, a series of images or video, or a tweet, means that people have access to far more information (most of it unfiltered by the press) than in the past. How this changes the way we view certain events, and whether it makes the "truth" any clearer, is something I'd like to explore in this project.