Essay 2 - the quality aspect in the content of Social media and Traditional media

Blogs are my favourite. As we all know, traditional media, as newspapers or TV programme, has more strict limitation on the content as well as the language. In my opinion, the news in the traditional media is of less novelty and comfortable, but social media is different. Some specifically blogs have the same good quality. They may not be written as the way of news, short and exact, but they can cover the truth and bring in some related news as well. I always read the blogs in Sina.com. The blogs there are listed by the visit amounts. And all the blogs there are classified in different filed, such as business, sports and gossip, etc. The blogs on the top place are always popular and credible. Further more, the comments below are interesting as well, though they are not as quality as the comments on Slashdot. Social media attracts me more is because of the communication among the author, the reader and me, which I can not do when reading the newspaper.

Benkler talked about the page rank in google and the peer production of relevance and accreditation in Slashdot. Those two tools make sure the two sites provide more qualified contents.

Google describes PageRank:[1]
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

As the definition and the figure showed above, Google use pagerank to know which site is of more importance without manual intervention or controls. That makes the information in Google credible and impartial.

I think Slashdot is an interesting example of managing the issue of quality in good way. They adopt a manual way to filter the comments. Slashdot implements an automated system to select moderators from the pool of users.[2] And then those moderators mark the comments. One comment is decided of importance or not by the grade it gets both from the moderators and the system. We can say that this rule is useful but not common, as it can be applied in the site with large visit amounts but not the one with small visit amount.

Quality is important but when we come to an piece of interesting news, we eager to know more. With social media, more and more social problems come out and be solved. That is because the government can easily control the traditional media but not social media. For example, if there is an parade going on somewhere, the news can be spread as quickly as possible by means of social media and be reported truly. This news can be a blog or a video putting on the internet. It is a hard work for the government to get all the news under control. There must be both good quality and bad quality news, so we have to distinguish the good one from the bad one with our common sense. I prefer social media is because it provides me with the choice of the news, but with traditional media, I can only read what they print or broadcast under the strict limitations.


[1] http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
[2] The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler, Yale University Press