By Khaya Thonjeni
Mumbai attacks at the end of November 2008; within few minutes a Twitter update reported on the attacks. Later, a Flickr page was opened and updated. Vinu, a Mumbai citizen reported on Twitter, “I am going to talk on CNN about the attacks”. Some 250,000 people read Vinu’s CNN entry and later posted their own videos on You Tube. Within 6 hours, a Wikipedia page was updated to reflect the latest developments. Within 10 hours mainstream media was showing Twitter and Flickr pages as “credible news sources”.
This is an example of the future direction of media according to Daniel Munslow, JMS alumnus and guest lecturer.
Employed by Newsclip, Munslow predicts more drastic technological changes in the near future for the South African media landscape. He points out a steady growth in South African online and mobile media resulting in an increased user access. “On a monthly basis, some 350 million web pages are accessed, and that is just from sites monitored by the Online Publishers’ Association. Some 400000 blog entries are read daily”, said Munslow. This number excludes unregistered and un-aggregated blogs. He also points out that the use of social media is expanding because of the increase of mobile user consumption and production of media.
Munslow ‘s talk to students last week also highlights that social media, mobile internet and citizen journalism have encouraged people to generate their own content and publish in platforms like You Tube, Flickr, and Twitter to name but a few. Readers are interested in the opinions of other readers and as a result, “people tend to comment more on articles generated by consumers than by journalists”, according to Munslow. His conclusion is that media language and platforms have increased and readers are likely to influence the agenda for mainstream media more in the future.