Social media’s most well-known characteristic is that revolves around participation (Chan-Olmsted, 2013 p.154). Users can share content and discuss content with anyone throughout the world. We are encouraged to engage in conversation when we are logged in to a social network, with this connectedness with family and friends is easy to achieve without physical presence (pg. 155). For people like me, with friends and family living out of state I can keep these ties strong and I don’t have to worry about growing apart from a grandparent or childhood …show more content…
This article mentions how with the use of microblogging journalists include their own opinions and beliefs with the topic they are covering, in fact about 61 percent of the “tweets” contained personal beliefs and opinions (pg. 30). While it can be considered unreliable to read a personal opinion and then restate it as fact I do feel that reading personal opinions can help a reader get a better understanding of a different point of view, especially if the reader doesn’t have any links to the people/place affected but the journalist does. For instance, during the “Black Lives Matter” protests I noticed that a lot of black journalists would post their support by telling instances where they have experienced racism in their own lives. This helped open my eyes a lot considering that I have never dealt with racism but being able to read multiple stories from different journalists that all had the same underlying theme helped me cut out any racist acts I was unaware I was