The Importance Of Media In Social Media

857 Words4 Pages
Social media is an important medium for communication, Facebook and Twitter now serve as a part of everyday life for many individuals. In a research study by Smith et al. (2012), Facebook had 1 billion users in October 2012, reaching one out of seven people on the planet. In July 2012, Twitter had 517 million users (Semiocast, 2012), according to the data analysis group Pingdom (2012), half of all social media users are between 25 and 44 years old. Therefore, young people are more likely to engage in social media than mainstream media, in terms of looking for news or information. In a survey of 2300 college bound students, 84% have Facebook accounts and 25% use Twitter (Noel-Levitz, 2012). In the United States, nearly 75% of web users consider newspapers, magazines, and political sites online as more credible than their traditional media counterparts (Johnson and Kaye, 1998). Therefore, the usage of…show more content…
First of foremost, most of the studies are mainly focus on either only mainstream media or alternative media itself, so this study is aim to examine on the comparison of both media to identify the credibility for both medium among young adults. Additionally, previous studies on the mainstream media are primarily focus on the newspapers than television and radio, therefore, this research will look into these three mediums in more in-depth. Thus far, studies discussed above show that the credibility of mainstream media is beginning to drop, especially the usage of newspapers. So, this study is carrying out to examine the credibility of news on mainstream media and social media in Malaysia scenario, as there are currently 51 newspapers in Malaysia, and Selva (2010) identified Bahasa Malaysia dailies reach 46.5% of the Malaysian population, followed by English dailies (28.7%), Chinese dailies (24.1%) and Tamil dailies
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