Victoria Sapientes Elegit the minimalist blog by syarif

Particularly in the last 1-2 weeks, the term social media really hit the Malaysian public. It was highlighted grandly in the 2008 GE that the opposition managed to capture quite a number of seats in the house through viral marketing and social media campaigns, but somehow recently the wave grew bigger.

Starting with the remarks from our beloved Rais Yatim; advising Malaysians not to "get in too deep" with the information received from FB or Myspace, the online societies of Malaysian replied to that notion with a nefty hashtag of #yorais - stating how ancient he is. Then on Saturday Star Metro featured the hashtag #klrb stating that twitter users share information on the whereabouts of police road blocks all over Klang Valley.

I agree with most social media fans out there that it is the "new" news paper. More often than not I receive breaking news for just about anything much faster than the RM5 The Star Newspaper SMS service; by just updating my twitter timeline. And of course by constantly refreshing my FB "news feed" and "status updates" columns.

However, although #yorais is so ancient (as what the "tweeple" put him as); he has a good point in his speech a couple of weeks back. Not everything in social media is as concrete as in the news paper.

Social media, like most things available on the net, is created by a single and is virally spreaded through a medium of sharing (ie twitter, FB, myspace). And, like a lot of things online, we are prone to pranksters, liars and all kinds of human. Chances are whatever we see online is not 100% real. One good example is the case where somebody created rumours that Johnny Depp was dead - which was later found out totally untrue. Or perhaps the local case where this dude claimed to be indirectly involved with the church arson case recently- which was later found out that he was just pulling everyone's leg.

News paper in the other hand has a social responsibility to report the truth, as it is written and published (that's why you need a licence to operate a news and/or any kind of publications for that matter). But there are always loopholes to the system. The truth can be bended. Apart from that I have seen countless times that certain news were not reported or not fully reported to protect certain interest. For instance, there are cases in Sarawak where the Penan girls were raped by the workers of Bakun project- but were only reported in the newspaper of that state, but never reached to the readers in West Malaysia. Why? Words on the street is that it's to keep the "stronger voice" unaware of the situation so that it won't jeopardize the project.

So, which one should you pick?

Honestly if you ask me, I will prefer social media for the unfiltered, unbias and most importantly super fast information. However, I will (and I would strongly suggest everyone to) just counter check it with the good 'ol newspaper (online of course) toverify the truth.

In this world where everyone is trying to protect their own interest, it is rather hard to know which information is true. But at least if the underground and the main stream medias are saying the same thing, we can be sure that there are some truth in it.

Uff, I might have wrote it confusingly just now. What I'm trying to say is be like Hannah Montana, get the best of the both world. Reas social media news all you want, but keep the main stream media information, for just in case.

And I hope that the government would understand by now that social networking is the thing of the present, and most likely for years to come. Wake up, bulk up, step up and rise up, if they ever wish to hear the true heart of the rakyat.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device via Vodafone-Celcom Mobile.