News Experiment To Rely Only On Facebook, Twitter

snydeq writes "With a setup ripped right out of a reality show — or, perhaps more fittingly, The Shining — a French-language public broadcasters association will put five journalists in a French farmhouse for five days, giving them no access to newspapers, television, radio, or the Internet, save Facebook and Twitter, to see how much world news they can report. The reporters will report this news on a communal blog. 'Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources,' said France Inter editor Helene Jouan. 'This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter.'"

Comments

Not much of a study.

[Anonymous Coward]

By following all the major news Twitter's, they will get a stream of information on what's happening, and then they can post the snippets of what they know on Facebook. Their friends on the outside can send them the full stories though Facebook's message system. Nothing of interest here, move along.

Re:Not much of a study.

[interkin3tic]

Oops, forgot the citation for that. 80% of fox news viewers in 2003 thought one or more of those 3 lies were true, and 45% believed all three.

Re:Not much of a study.

[TeXMaster]

Finally, world opinion was mixed to the invasion. Thirty six countries were involved in the invasion so it's hard to claim that "world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq" is completely wrong. More countries opposed the invasion that supported it, but opinion was at least mixed. Unless of course you get your news from NPR.

Not only more countries opposed the invasion than supported it, of those that supported it you had very strong opposition to it within the populace, even though the governors jumped on the Iraq invasion bandwagon hoping to gather some crumbs for the Iraq reconstructio and oil extraction contracts

My Predictions

[Monkeedude1212]

They get up to the second updates on the world of Pop Entertainment via Twitter

They get a confusingly clouded understanding of what happens in the worlds of politics via everyones facebook rantings.

Re:My Predictions

[dgatwood]

My prediction is that a bunch of people who know each other offline get together and pull a prank that ends up getting published as news. I'm seeing a sex scandal involving the President, the Pope, three aliens, a dead hooker, and the ghost of Elvis.

no access to sources or events?

[swschrad]

dreaming up "news" on their own? somebody get a Predator warmed up, we got a target... .

Special Report

[amaupin]

Jacques could really use some help fertilizing their crops in FarmVille!
Renee just found some Treasured Golden Mystery Eggs and wants to say thank you!

I can see it now

[Mistakill]

So well see news like this?:

In breaking news, Rob admitted he cheated on Katie, but Katie has dumped Rob, changed her status to single, and Mike is hitting on Katie on her wall hoping for a rebound hookup... Michelle is also flirting with Katie, and Katies friends are calling Rob a pig. Rob has threatened Katie with 'those pics'. We'll keep you updated as news comes to hand

This is dumb.

[hellop2]

FTA, "to see whether they can effectively report on the news by using Twitter and Facebook, and nothing else."

Does this mean that they can't click links to other websites? If so, that's stupid.

What good is news if it can't cite any sources? Is your bibliography filled with 1000 entries pointing to Twitter?

But if they could access other websites, then they would pretty much have access to the whole Internet. So, I doubt that's what they are doing. Nope, they are doing it the stupid way.

FTA, "Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources,"

So, they are trying to determine the validity of Facebook and Twitter as news sources while removing one of the things that makes them great news sources. That is, their ability to link to actual news sites.

Ok then, maybe they are trying to figure out if Facebook and Twitter (with its 140 character limit) are legitimate new sources. Well, whether or not they are capable of reporting the news, they are not a "great news source". You could cut n' paste anything into Twitter. So this whole thing is mute. Twitter could report the news just fine. But so could email, or SMS messaging, or packet radio. But these are not "great news sources". They are just another way to get data.

But social networking websites have value not only because of the large userbase, but also because of their ability to link to the Internet. Therefore, by cutting out "The Internet" from this experiment, they will not be able to answer the question, "Are Facebook and Twitter useful news sources?" They are part of the Internet. You can't separate them from it.