The way in which consumers access news has primarily been through print or broadcasting outputs for many years. However the advent of social media and the web, alongside viral trends has meant that information or news is constantly updating in real time and has become accessible to everybody at any hour, on many different platforms.

Have we moved away from our traditional means of news consumption and embraced the ever growing landscape of social media technology as our primary news provider? Social platforms now allow individuals to greater refine what outlets they receive their global news and information from, creating a an individualised bulletin board.

Facebook gives us the ability to ‘Like’ our favourite media institution’s pages which allows us to closely follow their posts about recent news, popular culture and subjects of personal interest. This has meant that our engagement with initial points of news consumption has started to reach us via separate channels on an ever changing, personalised ‘News Feed’.

One advantage of sharing news across social media outputs is that it has allowed our social interactions and news consumption to fuse seamlessly as one. Openly discussing your thoughts on topical issues has become easier, suggesting that freedom of speech has been enhanced via these websites (let’s not begin to discuss all of the information that they may, or may not have taken from you whilst doing so, that’s another issue).

These social media channels allow us to connect with others online, but what you share depends on how you want to engage with such outlets. Many people use them as a way to keep in touch with others and rarely share personal information. Others however can appear hypnotised by the constant information which these sites may bring.

Many of us use these sites more than we’d like to admit, but there are many layers to social media and it’s important to address how it’s changing the way in which we access news around the world. Which type of user are you?