I was first introduced to the TED talks a year or two ago. Some of my favorite authors and pundits have been featured on here including Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and a few others. The TED talks are excellent because they are informative but they are also professional and entertaining. The "thinking man's youtube" is definitely a good way to describe it.
Back to the talk that I just watched. As I started this video, I realized that it was almost 20 minutes long. I was a bit hesitant at first to sit and watch the whole thing right now, but once I started it, I found myself 15 minutes in without even realizing that I was watching this for an assignment. As the presenter stated, social media, although it has taken its beating from many directions, has been important in many ways. In a book that I picked up recently, Losing the News by Alex Jones, he is very pessimistic about the transforming of newspapers to a digital format, and wants back his old print news that was a "defender of democracy." As we just witnessed in this talk, this is anything but true. The example of the use of Twitter by Chinese citizens to do serious citizen journalism shows that digital and social media are more effective than ever at spreading information. While I guess you cannot call China a democracy, it is becoming more and more liberated by the day and social media seems to have an important role in that.
Yes, there are downfalls to social media when looking at it from a journalistic perspective, but if it can get information out that quickly and effectively, we at least know that it is serving a good purpose in one sense or another. I would also like to point out something that occurred to me while watching this video. Because so many people will tweet about an event as it is happening, it seems logical that false accounts will be filtered out. If there is one overwhelming take on it that many citizens are reporting, it seems likely that it will be pretty close to the truth. This is similar to the idea of Wikipedia. While many people discredit it as being an unreliable source, it is quite effective in putting out true and interesting information. This is because the minute somebody posts something false on a page, it will immediately get deleted and filtered out because there are enough users to keep others in check. This is kind of like Adam Smith's invisible hand in economics, applied to social media.
