Slashdot Mirror
Mainstream Media Finally Catching On To How News Propagates
Techdirt is reporting that the mainstream press may finally be "getting it" when it comes to how the next generation of news readers consumes and shares news. One student summed it up very succinctly by saying "If the news is that important, it will find me." "According to interviews and recent surveys, younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well -- sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter -- reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com -- with a social one."
Who don't have any friends.
And how apt that this news should reach me on Slashdot.
It was Meant to Be.
I dont even remember the last time I went to CNN.com, I get all my news from slashdot! haha
Somehow news of Brittney's latest pecadillo always manages to find me despite my struggle to be ignorant of her existence. I don't even have to use her full name for you to know who I'm talking about. With mainstream media there is still the problem that they play to the lowest common denominator of consumers. The type who buy Star magazine.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
As the trend continues, people are going to be even less likely to hear opposing points of view. If your circle of friends is the only group that sends you news, and your circle of friends tends to think/agree with your point of view, you'll be even more insulated.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I get a large portion of my news from slashdot. I find that maybe 20%, sometimes more, of the stories here are of above average interest to me. That's far better than scanning news sites, which anyway wouldn't find half the stories here. So I'm letting all of you function as my filter. Works well enough for the type of news slashdot specializes in. You know, for nerds.
For everything else, there's The Daily Show.
Traditional news broadcasters do a reasonable job of filtering information, but people tend to seek out filters that match their own interests, which is not only why news is broken up into sections on BBC's website, but why we have "News for Nerds" on slashdot, and news for surfers on surfline, etc.
A-Bomb
and the latest Missing White Woman.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
They're fucking kids !! Think back when you were a stupid ass kid. Did it matter to anyone outside your fucking circle of friends what you thought, what you heard, or what you fucking took ?? You were a stupid fuck then, kids are stupid fucks now. To put it succinctly, stupid fucks are stupid fucks because they are stpuid. The fuck is just for emphasis.
While this may be good, in that only news that interest people will spread leaving the boring stuff behind, it is bad for the obvious reason that Joe Geek may be poorly informed about a subject while finding it interesting. They may get excited about a given topic and forward it to all their friends and family, thereby spreading the news in a wonderfully viral way, but the "news" may be utterly uninformed and outright incorrect. Obviously, this effect is already taking place (how many of us have had non-tech-savvy parents send us emails about "forward this to ten people you know and Bill Gates will give you $1000"). Just because someone finds something interesting and "newsworthy" doesn't mean it's remotely accurate. Information now spreads faster than ever but so does misinformation...
Who don't have any friends.
;)
But you do get to share in a community of readers who never read the news articles or get the wrong end of the stick. I mean this wouldn't be slashdot if we didn't start reacting to the article summary that has little or nothing to do with the referenced article
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Instead of linking to Techdirt, could the editors please consider linking to the actual article?
Every day I take the content from slashdot and talk about it with people I know.
And I auto filter it. I take the stories that I think they want to hear to them. Or stuff that I think they can contribute more information on. Its just a natural part how we do things.
I think the new generation is just more instant about it.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Sure, that works for popular news. That's why CNN, foxnews, digg, reddit, etc all have news on Britney Spears or Brad Pitt. If the news gets that critical mass of people, it will make the rounds.
Naturally there will be certain circles where some types of news is more popular. But what hurts is that it reinforces the popular == good methodology. And that's what hurts me about people these days. They don't seem to be interested if they don't see one of two things. An immediate effect on them, or most of their friends being interested in it.
This is why I started the website in my sig. It's hard to find people who don't just read popular news, and like to think and discuss it.
The article is right in that news does propagate that way. But until we're at a point where we're propagating useful, knowledgeable news, we will still be doing a disservice to people.
How many of us get links to the economist in our email? It's certainly not popular on the social news sites. The potential is there with social news. We just need to get a larger mass of people disseminating useful news. Then we won't have to worry about things like "Mainstream media", as only the knowledgeable news will be propagated.
Everyone should call this number: 248-434-5508, and then encourage others to call it.
Rick Astley will thank you.
News in Action!
"sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks"
Except when the tubes are clogged and my emails take days to get through.
Really? People send each other news stories? Through email? And here I thought moving from making photocopies of the newspaper articles and mailing them through the postal system to using the fax machine was high tech!
Also; email's soooo 1990s. RSS, delicious for: tags and IM messages are how I keep up; mostly RSS.
Dear old media: I know things on the intarwebs change fast, but please try to keep up a bit better?
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
it would find me.
Wait, what?
I wouldn't call this news, a more accurate term would be gossip.
My ex-stepdad always went on about how the New York Times was "the paper of record" and how there was all sorts of journalistic integrity. He used this argument to dismiss any news items I brought up that seemed too fringe or kooky.
Anyone who has been paying attention these days realizes that the mainstream media is pretty much bought and paid for propaganda. Good propaganda contains a high percentage of truth, that makes it harder to detect the spin. There are so many cases on record where there has either been a concerted and deliberate effort to twist the news for political and financial gain or there has simply been gross incompetence where journalistic safeguards failed to operate in the intended fashion.
"Americans are the only people in the world who believe their own government's propaganda." Well, probably not the only people in the world but certainly among the most notoriously credulous.
Our biggest problem with the media is consolidation, the major outlets are now owned by gigantic corporations who have a vested interest in "creating their own weather" by steering news coverage. With smaller news organizations, the primary goal is still making money but they make the bucks by finding and publishing the dirt rather than by suppressing the facts to keep the corporate masters happy. Media that rely on ad revenue are just as untrustworthy, just look at the game reviews. "Festering Piece of Crap 4, at least a 7/10!"
I think generational attitudes are changing. People in my parents' generation have become disillusioned with the news and people my generation and younger never had any faith to begin with.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Yet another virus post. Link leads to VBS:Malware-gen, hosted at http://mcc.on.nimp.org/blog/1324233/unp48594913.
Yeah, that pretty much sums up the self-centered nature of the 'younger' crowd** nowadays. Someone give it to me. I'm too important to do it myself.
*Google for 'smarter than a fifth grader blonde idiot' and she is the first item
**How I hate to sound like an old, bitter man. Ok, maybe the bitter part.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I don't WANT the mainstream media to "get it". They are run by the multinational corporations and uber-rich people who have no clue nor care about me whatever. Their main purpose is propaganda, secondary purpose is profit.
For instance, in 2000 Ralph Nader wasn't on the ballot in enough states to win the election even if he carried every single state. OTOH the Libertarians were on the ballot in 49 states. The mainstream media slobbered all over Nader but had nary a word to say about the Libertarian.
Had the roles been reversed I'm convinced it would have been Nader who would have been ignored and the Libertarian trumpeted. In a truly democratic republic, all viable candidates (candidates on the ballot in enough states to win should they garner the votes) should have their views aired and be included in debates.
But the people who own the mainstream media are the same people who finance the elections in our pseudodemocratic plutocratic republic. With only two candidates to bribe with campaign cash, no matter who loses they win and you lose.
BTW, I don't give a rat's ass about Britney's drug and child support problems. Why is this meaningless nonsense trumping science, politics, and stuff that truly matters?
They were gioving away copies of the State Journal-Register (Warning - the first item in that link is hilarious) at the store the other day. The man giving them away asked if I ever bought copies. "Nope", I said. "I read it on the internet".
He looked really crestfallen at that, probably more so because of my white goatee.
I would have said "I get my news from links from slashdot" but he wouldn't have had a clue what I was talking about.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
It is not as if people are not already insulating themselves. Even when their opinions are refuted by the facts, they continue to push their bullshit onto news forums. They apparently don't even see what is right in front of their eyes, so I don't see how this trend will change much for them.
People with any intelligence seek to fully understand ideas and events and will continue to do so. So this trend is unlikely to change anything for these folks, either.
With luck, we might see trolls tending to flock to certain sites and thoughtful folks tending towards other sites, but with what becomes of sites like Newsvine, I'm not going to hold my breath.
Even if they "get it", nothing changes. What exactly are they going to do with this new found knowledge? The central point of entry into the social arena is still the front page of the mainstream media. Someone has to read it in the first place once to pass it on to their friends.
:(
Unless of course they decide to throw up a couple of AIM bots to link me to random news articles and then that will be the beginning of the end.
(In all seriousness though there's still the block button)
As others have pointed out, one problem with this is that you only hear what your friends are hearing, so it's easy to become/remain isolated, leading to greater polarization. /. have speculated that Microsoft employs people to work on moderating stories on /. in Microsoft's favor, and it's well-known that Scientology does related stuff with internet newsgroups. It's hard to trust a big anonymous system when motivated, biased people can astroturf it.
In this week's New Yorker magazine, they talk extensively about the transition from newspapers to online news sources, particularly concentrating on Arianna Huffington and Little Green Footballs. With respect to polarization, the article points out that in countries where this is (arguably) already going on to a greater extent than the US, there is significantly greater engagement in politics, though whether that's because of or just correlated with polarization issues, isn't clear.
But the main thrust of the NY article is research. Traditional news companies, particularly newspapers, spend a *lot* of money on reporters, who are expected to research their stories. Obviously that doesn't always happen, as a number of large scandals of late have made clear, but on the other hand, there is no attempt whatsoever by most email-forwarding people to verify what they're forwarding, which leads to misinformed polarization, a worse problem yet.
The flip side of that is that a reporter is unlikely to run across the one disgruntled employee who is willing to spill the beans, while a much more broadly based concept of news reporting, where many eyes and fingers contribute to the work, is more likely to get information from inside sources... but there's still that problem with trusting them to be right. Already we see adblogs. Many people on
But, as the New Yorker article made clear, this is largely eulogy: newspapers are dying, and it's not going to take very long. (People in the article said 2040 or thereabouts, extrapolating from what we see now.) The question is whether political blogs and the like will take their place or whether something somewhere in between will show up. Huffington has hired actual reporters from newspapers to do some work. Wouldn't it be nice if some other user-content websites we all know about did the same?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
"That's why I get my news only from objective sources like Faux News."
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
Today's Internet-consuming folks are perfectly happy to assign mainstream media to the trash with the accusations of being owned by the government and large multinational corporations with nobody's interests in mind except their own. OK, but then why are they flocking to mysapce, digg and reddit for their "news"?
Yes, the mainstream media is patheticly poor at delivering real meaning and is often sidetracked into entertaining news about entertainers rather than news. But the substitute today is for people to be quoting digg like people used to refer to seeing something from Walter Cronkite.
Many people are focused on the idea that if they see it on the Internet then it must have value or someone wouldn't have bothered.
Perhaps you'd prefer to flip over to MSNBC and listen the Chris Matthews talk about how Obama makes his nether-regions tingle.
Event -> Mainstream Media --> Daily Show ---> Me
Jon Stewart is my Walter Cronkite
It also says here that you were adopted. So that's funny too.
Slight problem for slashdot readers and others...Who don't have any friends.
That's just because they're newbies and haven't used the friends/foes tool yet.
See the FAQ on friends. Or hit the little clear button on postings by other slashdot users whose opinions you like and trust, and would like to see more of / have highlighted (or whose postings you DON'T like and don't want to see any more).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Here's the FAQ on friends.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So in a nutshell, they are saying the media has no friends ;)
Battle City
An article along the same lines by The Economist.
Discusses article ordering types for Digg.com
is secondhand from sources using anecdotal evidence to make blanket statements (about entire industries) that kow-tow to their readers. this story is the acme.
Which, of course, actually means:
I am typical of today's youth in as much as if it isn't something designed to entertain, feed or clothe me, then quite frankly I am too bloody bone idle to give a toss about it.
So thanks for agreeing with what the older generation has been saying for years.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Just wondering.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
As the trend continues, people are going to be even less likely to hear opposing points of view.
As compared to the Old Media? ROTFL!
The former mainstream media systematically suppress the news they don't want you to hear or they don't want to cover. (They were PARTICULARLY blatant during the presidential primary season, where they systematically avoided covering certain candidates: Ron Paul, Alan Keys, and Dennis Kucinich to name just three where they were particularly blatant.) If you compare the coverage on the Internet and that on the Old Media you'd think they were operating in two different universes.
In particular: Ron Paul was VERY popular with the people who actually found out about him. His single-digit showing in most of the primaries, despite his all-time-record fundraising (virtually all from individuals contributing an average of about $100) is a measure of how small a fraction of the population is currently getting a significant portion of their news from the Internet.
On the internet your social contacts might bring something to your attention and/or help you filter it. But if your circle of friends is missing some point of view, the first time you do a search on it you'll find plenty of opposing voices - and other circles of potential friends if you happen to change your mind about the issue.
This will continue unless/until the operators of all the major search engines become as politically corrupted as the operators of the Old Media, figure out how to work their bias into their search engine results, yet still manage to avoid being replaced by more open competitors. (Or some world-wide Stalinist-style regime manages to censor the whole internet.)
So, no. For the forseable future switching to internet news and social sites from Old/Mainstream Media will increase, not decrease, exposure to opposing points of view.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Welcome to 1998.... err... I mean the future of news and media distribution. Welcome to the concept that people no longer need you to do a lot of the filtering. Post the story online and if it is about something that people have an interest in, it will find its way to readers. In a sense, the editor that rejects stories because there is no "room" or for political/social reasons is a thing of the past. If it is a story supported by the facts and won't cause your news outlet to be discredited for some reason (i.e. horrible writing, bad format, lies, etc.), post the story online, and just have a link to it from your main webpage (or even a sub-page from your main site). Track page hits and if people find it interesting, well, start making it a more prominent story on your main page (i.e. move its link to a better spot).
/. :D
Again, people will find it and tell others about it, and they will tell others as well.
Heck, just look at
... is a little kid who's had ALL these ADVENTURES! B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"If the news is that important, it will find me."
Since when did important mean 'celebrity does drugs' or 'american idol 2342 is starting'. Rather than election processes and international rights violations? Whats important to the majority of people is NOT IMPORTANT.
Sure, that works for popular news. That's why CNN, foxnews, digg, reddit, etc all have news on Britney Spears or Brad Pitt. If the news gets that critical mass of people, it will make the rounds.
In the Old Media? Hardly.
Case in point: Ron Paul.
His grass roots campaign - composed mainly of the Internet-connected, because the MSM totally suppressed news of him - ended up with a head count comparable to the US troop strength in Iraq and broke all previous fundraising records via individual contributions averaging about $100.
If the operators of the corporate media don't want a story to get out they're fully capable of sitting on it no matter HOW popular is becomes by word-of-mouth - or word-of-net.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
. . . The Onion, who seem to be the only ones reporting on news that's important to me.
Can I bum a sig?
I just updated our "relationship", and so you've got a friend now :-)
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
As others have pointed out, one problem with this is that you only hear what your friends are hearing, so it's easy to become/remain isolated, leading to greater polarization.
And the first time you do a web search on any subject that came up with your friends you see multiple points of view. Follow them up and you'll see arguments. On some of them they'll convince you. Then you'll convince your friends - or switch circles of friends.
Meanwhile the Old Media (formerly the Mainstream Media) is strongly polarizing - presenting you with a very limited number of viewpoints on most subjects, leaving you to drop into one of the opinion slots in their story templates. Then it's "Let's You and Him Fight." with somebody in a different template slot.
So, no, social networks on the open Internet are far less polarizing than forming your opinions based on the Old Media.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"Our biggest problem with the media is consolidation"
That is not a problem, because the Net has already routed around that problem.
The current consolidation of news is ONLY limited to traditional mass media (Paper, broadcast), which is centralized by its own infrastructure anyways; Printing press, Antennas etc.
What you fail to realize or state in your premise, is that these media sources are also collapsing under their own weight, and centralization is a huge contributer of that collapse.
Your viewpoint is almost as archaic as traditional media is. The fact is, everyone is a reporter now, and everyone is a consumer of news. YouTube is the new boiler room of the news organization.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I keep finding out famous people died or tragic events happen through b3ta because suddenly everyone's photoshopping pics of the people/event, then I pop over to news.bbc.co.uk to find out what really happened.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
And even if it is, it often isn't relevant to our lives. Yes, everything affects everything else at some level, but the truth is that most of what you read in a newspaper doesn't is irrelevant to you, out of your realm of influence, or merely speculative. Pick up a year-old newspaper and see how compelling it is.
Psychologically, it's interesting to consider that while a major tragedy may happen to you or someone close to you just a handful of times in your life, a major tragedy is happening somewhere to somebody every hour. There was a time when we were blissfully unaware of that fact. Now we have a constant barrage of it. It is wearying, and to cope we have to tune a lot of it out.
I get my Technology news from Slashdot and my everyday normal news from Fark.com
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Well, if the news is that important, it will still reach us:
China blows up-->Gold Farming disappears
President assassinated-->YouTube servers bogged down
All fruit becomes sterile and withered due to an alien virus-->Apple changes its logo and name
--Edward Dassmesser
News is something someone doesn't want you to know, everything else is advertising.
I start my day with Google News, then check my email for more news from a guy who sends me stuff regularly. I also send him and others news articles daily. I also send articles on foreign policy topics to guys like Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall at TPM.
I read things he doesn't read and he reads stuff I don't read. Net win. Most of the stuff he sends I'm not that interested in, based on the sources, but I get enough useful stuff that I wouldn't turn off the flow.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Hmmm, out of the last 19,801 BBC News stories here in my RSS reader, perhaps half a dozen at most were things that I or someone in my "link emailing social circle" would have come across by ourselves. This just sounds like the sort of Webtopia bullshit the Reg is good at calling out.... sorry, given a choice of having only the BBC for news, and only stuff that gets emailed around... I think I'll be sticking with the BBC and paying my license fee.
The very interesting thing about Ron Paul is that he became quickly very UNPOPULAR among people who found out on their own about him. The truth about his past, his little radical newspaper, and the racist opinions he used to push.
Yeah - the real truth.
Ron Paul was just another phony politician, who's 15 minutes got stretched out a little too long.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Expect in the near future a default ending on all news stories:
"please forward this story to 100 emails in the next 5 minutes or we'll stop feeding this dog (picture attached)"
I absolutely agree. Ignore others on this thread that say "oh, i have tons of friends with different viewpoints"...Those guys haven't been to my small town in Indiana. Unadventurous, closed minded people work just as you describe with news. They filter it when they talk to each other about it. Since they do not question things or seek out a diversity of experience, the cycle perpetuates itself
Also, I honestly do not think you should be worried b/c this is not a new trend at all. Basically, boomer-aged media types are tripping over themselves to write stories about the 'new media' so they can be 'relevant.' The truth is, yes the internet is new media...a new medium of delivering the same information. Same content, new channel. Text, audio, and video via computer network...that's what 'new media' really is. The content is the same old stuff.
To address the article, it's a joke. We're all 'conduits for news'. Sending a link to someone via email is basically the same as telling someone verbally from a communications theory perspective. It's just a different channel. People have passed on information to one another since people existed.
Not a chance in hell. Nobody is replacing anything. The professional filter (CNN, NYtimes, etc) is a pre-requisite for this 'social filter' they are describing. Without CNN or the NYtimes, who provides the professional news for the story that is in the link that one friend emails to another? This is all just hype from people who do not yet understand that the internet is just a channel for information. Sending a friend a link to an article about story X is the same as telling them about story X at the watercooler. The idea that the internet has created some new 'social filter' for news is silly.
Thank you Dave Raggett
They get it just fine. They get it enough to rake in billions while the rest might lose their house... for being dumb asses. That's funny as hell... telling them, up there in their towering palace, that they don't "get it". They're only pissed about one thing, and that's the possible loss of control. So of course they can do only one thing, and that's buy up all the pipe, and put up their firewalls to keep the control. And of course we'll help them by voting the politician of their choice.
BAAAHHHRFF! Oh wow, sorry bout that chief. I really can't handle my liquor anymore... well at least I didn't get any on the keyboard... always keep a wastebasket close to the desk... RRAALLLPPHHH... oh cool, there's a french fry
What?
That seems fair and balanced to me.
If that "bridge out" is really important, it will come to me.
will the entertainment companies catch on to how music propagates?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Ron Paul had a small but VERY vocal following. The majority of people would not support the views he espoused. The majority view is moderate, as established in recent voting records - we're politically pretty evenly split.
Ron Paul's views are extreme. He definitely appealed to those who agree with him, but even if his following would have been doubled if people had "just heard" his message, that's still not enough support to get him even close to being elected.
His worldview is far too simplistic. To suggest that we can ignore foreign problems and pull out of trouble spots without having dramatic domestic economic consequences shows how little he understands the nature of today's marketplace. While his views may be closer to the founding fathers' views than any other candidates, their view of international relations could not be successful in today's world. In today's world, I'm confident that many of their views would be different.
Ron Paul is not the nominee, but that has VERY little to do with coverage from the mainstream media.
No, I don't believe everything I see in the media.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?