Social Media News as Disruptive Technology

Abstract

The Internet with its many innovations has transformed how humans interact with their environment and with each other. It has had serious impact on much of our socio-cultural fabric and has restructured our relationship with technology. Within the broader framework of the Internet as a technology, there is the concept of social media, which is changing, how we access the news and our news consumption habits. With the number of people turning to the Internet for news are increasing substantially and steadily, understanding how Internet users access the news could be informative of whether social media news is or could potentially be disruptive to the established institutions of traditional news media. This paper seeks to investigate the idea of social media news as being disruptive for traditional news media by investigating various aspects through the theoretical framework of “disruptive technology”.