And here we have another academic blog post for English 211G. The mission - write a critical response to The Facebook Effect on the News.
In this Atlantic Monthly article from February 2014, Derek Thompson argues that in 2013 claiming that Facebook and Twitter were the Internet’s new homepages might have been a nearly original observation, but in 2014, such a statement had become fact.
Thompson supports this argument by noting that traffic from homepages had dropped across many websites while traffic from social media dramatically increased. He includes a supporting graph showing that in December 2011, Google and Facebook sent near equal numbers of clicks to the Buzzfeed network. By December 2013, Facebook’s share of the traffic was more than three times that of Google's.
 |
| Do we want news or cat pictures? |
From that foundation, he goes on to consider the question of what kinds of stories do people click on from Facebook. He notes that The Atlantic’s most successful Facebook stories ‘aren’t news-pegged’ but are “what journalists call ‘evergreen’ stories”. Evergreen stories aren’t about recent events. They are about subjects of ongoing interest such as happiness, dieting, and decision making. He notes that these are stories of the sort that Upworthy specializes in and that Upworthy was definitely enjoying an abundance of clicks from Facebook pages.
Thompson points out that Facebook’s News Feed isn’t really a news feed at all. As Thompson says it can be better described as an entertainment portal. He cites a 2013 Pew study that fewer that half of Facebook users ever even read news on Facebook and only 10 percent log into Facebook specifically to see news.
To support this observation Thompson supplies Top 20 lists of Twitter’s top stories in 2013, the Top 20 most searched stories for 2013, and Buzzfeed’s Top 20 most viral stories. The Buzzfeed stories being the ones most clicked on from Facebook. Based on those lists, Twitter seems to be a blend of news and evergreen stories, heavily skewed towards entertainment news. The most searched stories are much more strongly focused on news stories. The Facebook (Buzzfeed viral) stories are largely entertainment and evergreen stories.
 |
| Cats can be awfully cute. |
He goes on to claim that the primary difference between Facebook and older forms of entertainment is that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation”. This is the first statement in the article that I have to disagree with. I can’t actually recall how the News Feed was in 2014, but it currently is only somewhat based on your activity. Yes, we do choose our friends and how we interact with our friends’ posts, but that only gives us the illusion of creating our own News Feed.
I can think of at least one reported instances of Facebook manipulating News Feeds:
Even when not manipulating the New Feed actively, the Facebook algorithm exercises a great deal of control over what we are shown. Follow someone and interact with every single post that appears in your News Feed and Facebook still won’t show you all of their posts. Follow a page and it is even worse. Facebook wants page owners to pay for advertising and limits how many of their followers see each post organically.
 |
| Me? I prefer dog pictures. |
While we can certainly influence what we see on Facebook, we do not create our own News Feeds. Although I disagree that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation” I do agree that it does indicate users’ preferences.
All in all, Thompson’s article was worth reading and very appropriate to this class. He highlights one of the major differences between social media (Facebook and Twitter) and other means of getting information from the Web. I found it interesting that Twitter usage skewed more towards news seeking than Facebook usage. I would have thought that the shorter format of Twitter would not encourage that. It shouldn’t have surprised me though. Even though I follow mostly authors and publishing related people on Twitter, I still see a ton of news come through my feed.
What do you think? Do you know anyone who’s Facebook (or Twitter) feed is all news all the time?
Well, interesting.... I hadn't really thought about it but you're probably right. Twitter is probably better for news than Facebook but ultimately, it's all about using our own filtering for determining reliability.
ReplyDelete