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Increasing Of The Role Of The Social Networks On The Media Field

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  • Increasing Of The Role Of The Social Networks On The Media Field

    INCREASING OF THE ROLE OF THE SOCIAL NETWORKS ON THE MEDIA FIELD
    Samvel Martirosyan

    http://www.noravank.am/en/?page=anali tics&nid=2443
    19 April 2010

    Today the conceptual change of the network media connections is
    taking place. In recent years the search engines, which, in fact,
    became dominant in the sphere of the information dissemination, have
    been the key factor for spreading information. For the owners of the
    web-sites the main factor of entering the information field was and
    is the dominance in the search engines on the relevant request. At
    the same time the tendency is exhibited towards the re-formatting
    of the information field and shift of the dominance in favour of the
    social networks.

    >From search engine to the social recommendations Search engines deliver
    a result on a definite demand according to the separately elaborated
    and permanently refreshed principles of the site authoritativeness,
    its novelty, content and more than a hundred other principles, a part
    of which is kept secret (in order to avoid artificial markup on behalf
    of the web-sites owners) and is varied depending on the search engine.

    The availability of the huge amount of the information delivered
    brings to the fact that search engines show the end user only the most
    relevant results. Thus, Google delivers only first thousand results,
    ignoring the rest. At the same time, according to the statistics,
    most of the users turn only to first 10 results of the request (and
    among them the majority looks only first three results).

    The increasing of the media stream and the exponential growth of the
    online media caused the search engines shift to separate services
    which deliver the real time automatic matching of the news. Thus,
    in June 2003, the main Russian language search engine announced their
    new ñÎÄÅËÓ.î&#xC F;& #xD7;ÏÓÔE service. At that time the company announced that
    the users are delivered quite a new service - the unification of the
    news close in content in topics and highlighting the main topics of the
    day. At the same time ñÎÄÅËÓ.î&#xC F;& #xD7;ÏÓÔE became multi-media project. There
    are not only texts, presented on the site, but also photo-, audio-,
    and video files. "The processing and systematization of the news
    is going on automatically. Yandex does not produce its own news; it
    just reflects impartially the informational picture of the day. The
    algorithms of the analysis and ranking of the data are the original
    elaboration by Yandex, based on the textual likeness and clustering
    of the information flows". (1)

    Google released the analogous service Google News in test mode a
    year earlier, in April 2002, but the final release of the news search
    was made only in 2006. The similar services were also introduced by
    other search engines. (Besides, the separate services, which aggregate
    the news on media grounds, have also appeared). The achievements of
    the search engines which were breakthrough at that moment, gave the
    impulse to the development of the online media resources.

    At the same time the development of the Internet caused the information
    market to be ceased by two competitors of the traditional media. On
    the one hand, the blogs, which have turned into the alterative source
    of information, are getting more and more popular.

    The materials have been generated in the blogosphere which can compete
    with the big mass media in the responsiveness and content. Later on,
    the integration of the blogosphere with the traditional information
    grounds began.

    But the qualitative changes in the distribution of the media
    traffic have been caused by the appearance and promotion of the
    social networks. For the recent five years social networks have shown
    explosive growth; the number of the active users in the separate social
    networks meets tens and even hundreds of million; their prevalence is
    of global character. Many social networks are localized, e.g. Chinese
    www.51.com, which has more than 100 million registered users, or
    the Russian language Odnoklassniki.ru (45 million registered users,
    the traffic is 10 million in 24 hours (2)) or VKontakte.ru (the
    most active Russian-language social service which has more than 65
    million registered users). At the same time the main social networks
    as for the number of the users, are global and multi-language. Thus,
    the Facebook - the biggest social network, has gathered more than 450
    million registered users for 4 years of its existence and continues
    its dynamic growth. Among the dynamically growing social networks
    the Twitter should be mentioned where the content formed by the users
    is restricted to 140 symbols. The obligatory brevity of the messages
    and the easiness of their publication (the messages in Twitter can be
    posted both through the computers and the programmes for the mobile
    phones or SMS) caused the service to be actively used by traditional
    media for disseminating its information and to become a mean of civil
    journalism. Twitter, in fact, substituted traditional media in the
    period of the cataclysms or social unrest (e.g. during the encounters
    between opposition and police in Iran, or the earthquake in Haiti and
    etc.). Today, more than 50 million posts appear in Twitter every day.

    Social networks are generating a huge amount of content. Besides, here
    the conditions are created to spread material, links and multimedia.

    Unlike search engines in the social networks the clusters of the users
    who trust to each other are formed; the authoritative users appear.

    Correspondingly, the recommendations of the definite users become more
    acceptable for the average user than the results delivered by machines
    like Google, Yahoo, Yandex. The factor of the increasing information
    flow is also important. Under such conditions the average user is
    not able to single out the necessary news sifting out the secondary,
    even using the modern search engines. Correspondingly, the role of
    the authoritative users who can work with information by themselves
    is increasing. Thus, social networks become "recommendation" services,
    which generate a huge amount of links to the media resources. E.g.

    according to Yandex the 8% of all the records in Russian segment of
    Twitter are the links to the mass media (3). Today the social networks
    are turning into the dominating "recommendation" services to which
    the search giants cede. Thus, since the middle of 2009 the traffic
    only from Facebook social network to the sites of the broadcasting
    companies exceeded the traffic from Google News service (Table 1). At
    the end of 2009 the number of Facebook users surpassed the number of
    Yahoo.com visitors (Table 2). In March 2010 Facebook outrun Google
    as for the share of visitors (Table 3). In general the traffic from
    Facebook to the biggest sites exceeds, sometimes rather essentially,
    the similar rates from Google (Table 4).

    Thus, the influence of the mass media in the Internet is directly
    connected not only with their position in the search engines but
    also in the social networks. Correspondingly, the format of the
    media materials is being changed too. Thus, the specificity of the
    social networks implies giving greater consideration to the titles,
    headlines of the materials.

    Armenia and social networks As for Armenia, here the social networks
    become a key factor of communication both in Armenia and in the context
    of Armenia-Diaspora communication. Thus, Armenian network mass media,
    in fact, have rather restricted audience. The main mass media have 2-3
    thousand visitors a day on average. At the same time social networks
    are the main points of entering Internet for the Armenian user. For
    example, Odnoklassniki.ru has more than 200 thousand users from Armenia
    which is comparable to the number of the Internet users in Armenia.

    Besides, the Armenian user is actively mastering the English language
    social networks today - Facebook, Twitter (it should be mentioned
    that the penetration in this networks is lower than to the Russian
    language services, such as Odnoklassniki.ru, VKontakte.ru). Even more,
    there are exclusively Armenian networks being formed, which, however,
    have still had rather restricted contingent.

    So the social networks turn into the main sources of information for
    the Armenian users as well. At the same time, Armenian online mass
    media began penetration into the social networks, hoping to increase
    their own audience essentially. The appearance of the social networks
    may cause the qualitative changes in the structure of the Armenian
    segment of Internet and Armenia online media (e.g. it may cause,
    on the one hand, the growth of the number and, on the other hand,
    the increase of the gap between separate resources in the aspect of
    the number of the audience).
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