As
of January 2014, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet
& American Life Project, 58 percent American adults had smartphones.
For the 18-29 group, that figure was 83 percent — higher than any other age
group, according to Pew. According to comScore,
174 million people in the United States owned smartphones as of August 2014, up
3 percent from May 2014. As the number of smartphone users grows, the appetite
for entertainment and social media on these devices also is growing, according
to Nielsen.
In fact, time spent using smartphones now surpasses web usage on computers in
the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy, according to Nielsen.
As
such, smartphone users are demanding more smartphone apps and more
mobile-friendly websites. “Apps make up the lion’s share of time spent using smartphones,” Nielsen
says, “led by the growth in time spent using apps for entertainment and media.”
Among the smartphone app leaders in the United States are Facebook, YouTube and
Google, comScore reports. Not surprisingly, global revenue for smartphone apps
is projected to rise from $22.5 billion in 2014 to $29.4 billion in 2015,
according to Statista.
That’s in tandem with a predicted rise in global smartphone shipments from 1.24
billion in 2014 to 1.8 billion in 2018, according to IDC. With the
app market exploding, smartphone consumers are sending a clear message that
they expect mass media to keep pace with the delivery of mobile-ready content.
In fact, it’s been argued that mobile is the seventh
mass media channel, and apps represent the eighth. They’re giving
traditional channels such as TV and radio a run for their money.
A new
Gallup poll indicates Americans’ trust of mass media has returned to its
previous all-time low of 40 percent. Why the drop? Gallup offers this possible
explanation: “As
the media expand into new domains of news reporting via social media networks
and new mobile technology, Americans may be growing disenchanted with what they
consider ‘mainstream’ news as they seek out their own personal veins of getting
information.”
Although
Gallup doesn’t identify any of those outside-the-mainstream veins, one of them
certainly is blogs. According to an infographic posted on Social
Media Today, 23 percent of time on the Internet is spent on blogs, and 77
percent of Internet users read blogs. As noted in the infographic, news blogs
now are rivals to mainstream media outlets. Technology — in this case, blogs —
has made mass media more democratic. “Instead of a limited number of
‘trusted’ and ‘objective’ news sources, like the familiar network anchors, we
now have an almost limitless number of outlets on the Internet and TV. In fact,
anyone can publish a blog or tweet,” Rory
O’Connor, director of the Digital Resource Center at Stony Brook University’s
Center for News Literacy, wrote in a New
York Times blog post. Blogging has allowed anyone with computer access to
become a storyteller and to bypass traditional mass media, with trust being put
in the hands in more and more people outside the “mainstream.”
Perhaps more than any other technological advancement, social
media network Twitter has helped feed our increasing desire for short, quick
bursts of information. The micro-blogging service delivers news, opinions,
jokes, inspirational quotes and other information in 140-character snippets, at
a rate of about 6,000
tweets per second.
One major benefit of Twitter is that it enables journalists and
everyday folks to “break” news. For example, Twitter users were first to report
the death of singer Whitney Houston and the Boston Marathon bombings, according
to Mashable. “Twitter has revolutionized global news delivery and
consumption,” Mashable
noted. Indeed, millions of people around the world now turn to Twitter as a
primary source of news, especially when a major news event has taken place.
Many of us have come to view Twitter as a go-to news source, in a vein similar
to that of cable news network CNN.
It’s worth noting, though, that not everyone is part of the news
revolution fostered by Twitter: According to the Pew
Research Center, just 19 percent of online adults in the United States used
Twitter as of January 2014, compared with 71 percent of online adults in the
United States who used Facebook as of September 2013. Furthermore, according to
Pew, just half
of Twitter users in the United States get news from the micro-blogging
site. Still, the power of Twitter to help change our expectations of how
information is delivered — quickly and succinctly — is undeniable.
