Preston Perry

Intro to Mass Communications

Professor Zimdars

October 15th, 2015

                                                                                         Blog Assignment #2

        The power of social media is at an all time high. Social media is deeply intertwined with the broadcasting of world wide televised events. Smart phones have schematic tactics and ways to real you into watching these events both before and during the event. Today's generation of newspaper articles has been replaced by smart phones and futuristic technology. Today people are notified information a lot more efficiently, with what I call miniature lap tops in the palm of our hands. Why would anybody pay money for a newspaper or go out of their way to buy one, when world wide news could be found with one click on your cell phone? Promotion of important events gets sent directly to your phone as if it were a text message or an email. Our generation is very futuristic in our own distinct ways.

        Today's broadcasters have very slick ways of informing you when world wide events are being televised. Our generation is filled with adolescents who live for technology. Teens can not go anywhere without having their cell phones these days and they are the largest target market in the world. Promoters will send notifications straight to your cell phone informing you about live broadcasts via twitter. Twitter notifications never fail to pop up on my phone informing me that people are "tweeting" about live broadcasts. Twitter uses hash tags as a way of informing teens. When a lot of people are using the same hash tag during an event, they say there is a "trending topic." For example during the 2015 VMA Awards I received a notification that "#VMA" was a trending topics. My phone buzzed as if it were text message from my mother, but no it was actually twitter notifying me that millions of people are tuned in, and #VMA was a trending topic. About fifteen years ago people hardly had cell phones, and now I'm getting reminders that millions of people are watching the VMA Awards.

        Once you are notified and somewhat interested to whatever event may be going on twitter has you exactly where they want you. As soon as you reveal the notification on your phone that millions of people are watching the VMA Awards, you will be immediately included in a variety of visuals that will make you laugh and interested in whats going on. These visuals consist of so called  "memes, tweets, vines, videos, hash tags and instagram posts." Here is a link that will take you to a video of funny memes and posts on social media that all flood the Internet like a storm pre, post, and during the event. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSym1cXQNdU This link is a compilation of memes that flooded the Internet because of the 2015 VMA awards. A lot of these memes are offensive, but that is today's generation of humor. Humor is an easy way to pull in an audience. Social media and live broadcasting has became highly intertwined in recent years. 

        Today's promotion schemes are very simple. The key to success is targeting the youth. Once the youth is hooked, the parents have no choice but to provide happiness for their children. They are going to do everything they can to make their child happy. Frankly today what makes the youth happy is smart phones, Apple Products, iPads, iPhones, and MacBooks. The reason they want these products is so they can use social media and that is the door way to promoting to the youth. There are such a large amount of people from all over the world on one live online social experience that it makes it easy for promoters to make their live broadcast as live as its ever been. Social media is definitely more powerful than the newspaper in today's generation. It is in a competition with the news, but social media will truly fill you in on everything that's going on in the world. When natural disasters occur, "tweets" such as "#PrayForIndonesia" will scatter the Internet informing you that there was just a natural disaster. This is the futuristic world we live in today, elderly people do not even bother with trying to learn about today's generation of technology and slang terms used via social media.