Maybe in part... ????
What I believe is that most of the social media can start stirring up certain issues, but one of the most critical leverage is still the mainstream media; major news channels, news papers, and so on.
(Benkler - from http://benkler.org/Face.html)
Even thought Benkler argues that blogs and other on-line media can do the role of the watchdog... (and he has pretty optimistic view... look at him in the picture! He looks very optimistic!! lol) well... even in his book, The Wealth of Networks, it is apparent that mainstream media played a critical role to leverage the movements. (Look at the graph on page 224 for Sinclair case and the diagram on page 234 for Diebold case of this pdf file (chapter 7 only).) Not only in Benkler's book, but also in many other cases, mainstream media play more important roles than what we assume. Think about Occupy Wall street, Occupy DC, and some other incidents... although those cases were well known in the social media world, what if it was NEVER picked up by any of the mainstream media?
I believe it is hard to ignore when a majority of people get to know some events/incidents, but there still will be a huge difference depending on weather the event is picked up by major media outlets or not...
This may change, but for now, blogs and other social media outlets can be a source of news, but I wonder if they can really replace any the current mainstream media in the near future...
Just a thought. I may keep looking into this and write a paper????
Any other thoughts??
One thing to think about is that there is no "social media" but lots of people engaged in the practice of participating in social media. Many journalists, reporters and the like are using social media to pay attention to what they might want to write about. And social media users are paying attention to breaking mainstream news, like whitney houston's death this past weekend.
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