Radio, Television, Social Media: How Technology Shapes the News

How Technology Affects the Response to Major Global Events & How Said Events Affect the Growth and Development of Technology, with a Focus on Social Media

Seventy years ago, the news spread via radio broadcast that Pearl Harbor had been attacked.  News reports at the time were vague, due to the limited abilities of contemporary radio news techniques. Even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initially received vague reports. It wasn’t until the next day, when Roosevelt addressed Congress and delivered that famous quote, “Yesterday, December 7, a date which will live in infamy, the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked,” that the American public discovered the full scale of the assault.

On the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, we couldn’t help but wonder what role social media would have played had it existed in the 1940s. How would the news of the event have unfolded differently if social media had been part of the equation? I posed the question on all the social media sites on which I’m active to see what the response would be.

The first response actually referenced 9/11, which I thought was interesting because, well, social media as we know it today didn’t exist at the time.  It is hard to believe because social media is so ingrained with our normal lives today, but out of the leading social media and networking sites, only MySpace existed. MySpace was still in its infancy, and lacked status updates, the concept of a News Feed, and the ability to share items at the click of a button -- all of which are so common place today that it’s difficult to imagine a world (or Internet) without them.

But it is definitely apropos to mention 9/11, because in the context of technological history and the history of the Internet, it is still very important.  According to Amit Singhal, when 9/11 happened, people went to Google to find updates.  Back then, there was no Google News.  Google directed users to various news sites and back to their televisions.  The lesson in all of this was that Google needed a way to provide relevant search results for the news.  And thus -- Google News was born.

This brought up a number of other questions: how would any major historical event have been different with social media?  How have those events affected social media?  How have technological advancements in general affected major historical events and the way that they are broadcast to the public?  How would historical eras as controversial as the Vietnam War have been different with social media? (Yeah, perhaps it’s apt to mention that I recently visited the Newseum in Washington D.C.) 

Thus, the next train of thought was, “what major historical events were marked by the means in which they were broadcast?”  The bf and I brainstormed a short list (‘cause that’s what we like to do in our spare time... Go ahead, call us crazy).  It begins with the radio, so the effects of newspaper, print and photography are missing, mainly because we compiled this off the top of our heads.  But the Newseum had a whole exhibit about the development of print, which included copies of the first journals and newspapers to be published and what major events they covered.

Date	Event	Medium
December 7, 1941	World War II/Pearl Harbor	Start of radio, end of golden age newspapers, radio is way to get news right away
November 22, 1963	Kennedy Assassination	Network Television (black & white) – ABC, CBS, NBC. Beginning.
February 27, 1968	Vietnam -- “We are mired in stalemate” broadcast by Walter Cronkite	Color network television. First war that was broadcast on TV in full color. Role of color – you can see the blood
July 20, 1969	Landing on the Moon	Satellite provides live worldwide coverage. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” People could hear the voice of and see video of a man who is on the moon
December 30, 2006	Saddam’s death	YouTube, “Social Media 1.0”
June 25, 2009	Michael Jackson’s death	Google Search (link to Google’s blog post)
May 2, 2011	Osama bin Laden’s death	Social media, Twitter in particular

A mere two years, when Michael Jackson died, users, experts and even the creators still did not comprehend the full implications and power of social media. The Wonder Boys of Google received so much search traffic that they thought it was a spam attack, and Google learned for the first time the network effect that social media could have. It shut down Google search, nearly bringing down the Internet and forcing Google to change all their algorithms to account for the power of social media’s network effect.  Two years later, after the leaking of Osama bin Laden’s death on Twitter people were prompted to gather and rally in public places like Times Square, the White House, and the pentagon, not by the noise of a Breaking News bulletin, but by the chirp of a tweet, demonstrating how news can spread faster than television networks or news websites can disperse it.

With that in mind, I had to ask: what would such an effect have on people’s perceptions of world events and movements throughout history?  In other words, if word-of-mouth news could be spread on sites like Twitter and Facebook, how would that have changed how people felt about, say, the US entrance into World War I?  Would people have been as eager to join the army if they were getting tweets, pictures and updates from European soldiers already entrenched in the war?  What about World War II? How would mothers have felt about their sons storming the beaches of the Normandy or suffering the swamps of Guadalcanal?

Yet, perhaps, we are overestimating the role of social media.  Going back to that original question posted on Facebook, it is necessary to mention that many responses conveyed the fact that they didn’t find out about Osama bin Laden on Twitter, and it wasn’t until the news came on later that evening that they learned what had happened.  It forces us to ask the question: are we so immersed in social media that we are biased about what it can do? In all honesty, how frequently does an average user utilize sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or even Tumblr?  Do we perhaps overestimate the reach that is has?

Two thirds of Americans are on Facebook, but how frequently do they actually use it?  Few of my close friends really use Facebook at all, finding it more appealing to communicate via text or email.  Yes, they are all on Facebook, but most don’t use it definitely don’t have Twitter accounts. Maybe my circle of friends is odd, sure.  But some responses that I got hinted that yes, they did notice that some big event was taking place based on Facebook or Twitter status updates, but often these updates were vague.  For example, one friend said that, in response to the July 2011 bombing in Mumbai, she saw many status updates along the lines of “not again,” but few were descriptive or clear as to what had occurred, and it wasn’t until later, when she opened up a news site, that she discovered what exactly had happened.

Regardless, I strongly feel that social media’s full potential has not yet been realized.  It’s clear to me that social media has an effect on our social consciousness.  It certainly aids in gathering and organizing movements like the Arab Spring that brought down Mubarak or the Occupy Wall Street. At the time of World War II, more people were proud to join the army and fight for their country in a foreign land; however, in a post-Vietnam age, after millions of TV viewers saw the atrocity of war displayed right before their eyes, you just don’t see as many people lining to fight for Uncle Sam. With our HD TVs, war is even more graphic -- just look to the videos of Saddam’s death. 

Furthermore, self-publishing decreases censorship and undermines any attempt of control of a news story.  For example, Mubarak tried to contain the story of the growing dissatisfaction with his regime, and went as far as turning the Internet off. None of this was successful.  In the end, the power of the people networked online and was able to produce a revolution offline.  (They were able to find ways around Mubarak’s attempt to shut down the Internet.)

It’s clear that social media is shaping how news is conveyed, and in turn, the way that people think about the news and the way they react to it. However, it is yet in its infancy, and the full effects of it are yet to come.  As more people feel comfortable with the technology, it will be interesting to see where this takes us as far as content creation and reporting go.  We must not forget, either, that the news and global events also shape the growth and development of these technologies.  What will the next Social Revolution be?

This post was a collaboration between myself and my boyfriend, whose encyclopedic knowledge was a valuable resource during the writing of the post.