THE AMERICAN BOBSLEDDER JOHNNY QUINN WAS ONE OF THE MEDAL hopefuls for Team USA at the 2014 Winter Olympics. But the thirty-year-old Texan made headlines well before he even went for gold. What caught the public’s imagination was not his prowess in navigating the twists of the narrow bobsled track; it was his skill at getting out of tricky situations in Sochi. Trapped in a bathroom in the Olympic Village, Quinn smashed his way out, and then snapped a photo and tweeted about his experience. Alongside a photo of a door with a gaping hole in the middle, he wrote: “… With no phone to call for help, I used my bobsled push training to break out. #SochiJailBreak.” His mishap propelled him into a social media Olympic phenomenon.
His message received 29,000 retweets and counting, with Quinn gaining more than 15,000 followers on Twitter in just three days. The tweet was also widely reported by the media, embedded in thirty-three news articles and counting. When Quinn and two teammates got stuck in an elevator, he naturally took a photo and shared it. That, too, was picked up by the media. Quinn’s tribulations were widely shared because they offered funny glimpses into the everyday life of a Team USA athlete. But they were also topical, tapping into a growing discussion about problems with the Olympic Village at Sochi, as people talked about their experiences, ranging from unfinished rooms without curtains or furniture to a lack of heating and yellow-tinged water. The hashtag #SochiProblems was used more 331,000 times after the world’s attention turned to the Black Sea resort town.
The Russian Olympic Organizing Committee had already contended with stories in the Western media about exorbitant costs, unfinished venues and even stray dogs, never mind ongoing criticisms of Russia’s anti-gay legislation. Big events tend to be plagued with teething troubles, but #SochiProblems highlighted how social sharing, powered by digital technologies, influences and reinforces public perception of the news. Instead of stories celebrating the herculean achievement of athletes, Sochi became a stream of funny, embarrassing, “only in Russia” anecdotes.
The story of Sochi’s problems illustrates how mainstream and social media intertwine to influence what makes the news and how the news is presented. The media has traditionally been one of the elite groups interpreting events around us, presenting them in a certain way. For the past two hundred years, the news industry has been the main gatekeeper of information, deciding what was important enough to report and transmit to the rest of us. Our use of social networking technologies to filter the news means we have taken back some of the power of the media. It has given rise to a complex system in which the way people make sense of the news is shaped by the choices of thousands of ordinary people, prominent figures such as Olympic athletes and traditional elites such as journalists.
Remember Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” comment on October 16, 2012? The Republican candidate used the phrase in the second presidential debate as the election campaign neared its climax. He was replying to a question about the hiring of women for top jobs during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts in 2002. The phrase could have been interpreted in a positive light, as Romney was saying he had many talented women to draw on. But it wasn’t. Instead, the awkward phrasing became an Internet meme. Within minutes, it became a running joke on Twitter, spawning its own hashtag and thousands of parody photos poking fun at the idea of “women in binders.”
The mainstream media picked up the story, and “binders full of women” became the news, overshadowing the substance of the debate. The interplay between the social media reaction to the debate and a press primed for an electoral gaffe set the terms for the news coverage. Out of the thousands of words spoken by Romney, those four are the ones that many will remember. It is just another example of how social sharing is changing not just who decides what is important, but the way news is presented, interpreted and understood. The social filtering of news and information is transforming how we learn about the world and is having an impact on what we think and do.
Much of the change is being experienced first in the U.S. By 2013, a third of Americans were finding news via social media, almost as many as do using Internet searches. The proportion is even greater in Spain and Italy. What these countries have in common is weakened legacy media. In countries with strong online news brands—Denmark, Germany, Japan and the U.K.—social media is far less important as a source for news.
There is a risk of overstating the importance of sharing and failing to recognize national differences. In most Western liberal democracies, television remains the main source of news for most people. It is vital to understand how this mix of mainstream media, our social circles and technologies hidden from sight shape the what and how of the information that commands public attention.
For every generation, there are dates in history that become part of our collective memory. From the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the death of Princess Diana to the attacks of 9/11, some points in time become indelibly inscribed as “where were you when” moments. In the 1960s, when television was the new technology whose importance was growing, one such occasion was the landing of the first man on the moon. On the night of July 20, 1969, some 125 million Americans gathered around their television sets to watch the Apollo 11 landing. Over the course of that night and the early hours of the next morning, they watched astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin bounce weightlessly across the grainy, grey landscape and collect rock samples.
The moon landing was broadcast live on the three U.S. networks that ruled the airwaves at the time. But there was one network anchor to whom Americans turned above all others: Walter Cronkite of CBS. That night, 45 per cent of the TV audience tuned in to hear Cronkite exclaim, “Oh boy! Phew!” as the Eagle module touched down on the lunar surface. More than fifty million Americans turned to Uncle Walter to experience one of the historic highlights of the twentieth century.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Walter Cronkite was a reassuring nightly presence in America, anchoring the CBS Evening News and helping to establish television as the dominant news medium of its time. An estimated twenty million Americans tuned in nightly to the avuncular anchor who became known as the most trusted man in the U.S. On the passing of Cronkite on July 17, 2009, President Barack Obama described him as “someone we could trust to guide us through the most important issues of the day; a voice of certainty in an uncertain world.”
The late 1950s and the early 1960s are known as the golden age of American television. During this period, TV grew to be the dominant form of home entertainment. By 1960, nine out of ten American homes had a TV set and television had become a staple of the news diet of Americans. When President Dwight Eisenhower decided to run for a second term in 1956, most Americans heard the news on television. When “Ike” suffered a stroke in November 1957, television was again the main source of news. By the late 1950s, TV played a pivotal role in spreading important news, even though it was considered at the time primarily as an entertainment medium. For decades thereafter, most people first heard about a major news story from television, radio and newspapers, rather than word of mouth.
Cronkite ended his broadcasts with his trademark sign-off, “And that’s the way it is.” The phrase sums up the place of television in telling audiences how to view the world. Fifty years later, a more appropriate catchphrase might be, “And that’s the way it was.” TV news anchors persist, but they do not command the same authority and audience in a multiplex of cable channels. Word of mouth is enjoying resurgence, amplified by social media. How Americans heard of one of the defining moments in America’s ten-year “War on Terror” provides some insights into the way information spreads today.
On the night of May 1, 2011, the White House surprised the media and the nation by releasing a terse message that President Obama was going to make a televised address later that evening. He then took to the air to announce the killing in Pakistan by U.S. Navy Seals of America’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden. By then, the president had already been scooped by Keith Urbahn, chief of staff for former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who broke the news on Twitter. “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama bin Laden. Hot damn,” he tweeted. The information spread swiftly when it was retweeted by then–New York Times reporter Brian Stelter, who had more than fifty thousand followers and a credible news outlet to his name.
For some, then, the answer to “Where were you when you learned bin Laden had been killed?” is “On Twitter.” While President Obama was still working on his speech, Twitter was abuzz with talk of bin Laden. Most of the tech-savvy readers of technology news website Mashable said they found out through Twitter or Facebook. However, the notion that social media has become the default channel for the news is too simplistic.
Researchers Barbara Kaye from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Thomas Johnson from the University of Texas surveyed Americans interested in politics to discover how they had learned of bin Laden’s death. Twitter might have been first, but the news reached a tiny fraction of the public. Only 5.6 per cent got the news on Twitter, and even fewer—4.6 per cent—on a social network. Since the study involved people interested in politics, just over a third had heard the news from political websites or blogs. And don’t write off television, as 12 per cent cited broadcast TV as the source for the news. A similar number heard it on the Fox News Channel on cable.
Others, like Lauren Mary Gotimer, were told by family or friends, either in person or by email and text messages. As the twenty-something Bentley University graduate recorded in a blog, she was asleep in bed after an exhausting day. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she checked her phone. To her surprise, there were forty-two text messages. One was from her sister, and the rest were from people she followed on Twitter. Gotimer read her sister’s text first. “Osama dead go amurrca—I hope you caught the address,” read the message. Gotimer was confused. At first, she thought her sister meant Barack Obama, but she soon realized it was Osama bin Laden. “I slept through a huge event in life,” wrote Gotimer on her blog, “but fortunately it didn’t take long for me to hear it all thanks to social media. Now all that’s left is for me to turn on my computer tonight to watch Obama’s address online.”
The Internet and social media have given rise to a hybrid media system. TV anchors still broadcast the news to the masses. Alongside them, people use social media services and technologies to create, share and comment on the news. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo summed it up in a marketeering yet shrewd observation when he described the platform as “this indispensable companion to life in the moment.” The idea of a commanding presence such as Walter Cronkite today seems an anachronism; social filtering is becoming increasingly significant in the circulation of information. The idea of friends and family selecting and recommending news to others isn’t new; social filtering has always been a part of how we run our lives. With blogs, email, text messages, Facebook and Twitter, social filtering not only has become much easier and more prevalent, but it is also changing our behaviour. Instead of seeking out the news, a generation is growing up expecting the news to come to them.
When Barack Obama first sought the American presidency in 2008, he ran on a promise of change, a break from what was labelled as the failed policies of the Bush administration. It was a message that resonated with the young. Two-thirds of voters under the age of thirty backed Obama, leading the Pew Research Center to conclude, “a significant generational shift in political allegiance is occurring.” At the same time, there were signs that a similar shift was taking place in the way these young voters were finding out about politics.
Surveys and interviews by market research companies found that younger voters were passing on the news to their friends via email and social networks. Conversely, they then expected their online connections to alert them to what they needed to know. “If the news is that important, it will find me,” a college student was quoted as saying in a May 2008 New York Times article. A year later, the editor of tech bible Wired, Chris Anderson, noted the trend towards information that “comes to me” even if we’re scorning the morning newspaper or evening TV newscast. “It’s news that matters. I figure by the time something gets to me it’s been vetted by those I trust. So the stupid stuff that doesn’t matter is not going to get to me,” he told the German magazine Der Spiegel.
What started out as anecdotal evidence of a paradigm shift in news habits has since been backed up by further studies. Social networks make it much easier to be alerted to news that “comes to me.” The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that, by 2010, half of Americans on social networks said they were getting some of their news from people they followed on sites like Facebook. Our relationship to the news has changed. By 2010, a third of Americans online were turning to Facebook to filter information, swap stories and react to them. This is not simply a U.S. phenomenon; an online survey of 1,682 Canadians in August 2010 revealed a similar trend. The study found that two out of five social media users said they received news and information on a daily basis from family, friends and acquaintances via social networks.
The young are the bellwether of upheaval. The trend among young adults is far more pronounced in the U.S. than in other similar developed democracies. A 2013 survey showed that almost twice as many eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old Americans cite social media as a source of news than print newspapers—45 per cent to 25 per cent. Denmark is close behind, with half of young adults getting news from social media compared with a third from print. In other countries, such as Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K., the numbers are close to parity.
The young have never lived in a world where news only came at certain times of the day from an elite group of people who told you the ways things were. “Why have to turn on the television for some entertainment, go get the newspaper for current events or pick up the phone to make a phone call when you can get all of that through one simple visit to Facebook or Twitter?” student Louis Medina told The Observer, the college newspaper of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 2011. “I get news from Facebook and Twitter all the time, especially because of the trending topics,” said another student, Paul Anthony, quoted in the same article. “I don’t check news sites daily.”
What was novel back then has since become everyday—if not for everyone, then certainly for a significant number of people. It is no longer just a young person’s game. It is no longer surprising to hear “I saw it on Facebook.” When Pew Research talked to Americans on Facebook in 2013, half said they got some of their news via the social network. “If it wasn’t for Facebook news, I’d probably never really know what’s going on in the world because I don’t have time to keep up with the news on a bunch of different locations,” wrote one person.
The expectation that the news will come to us has unexpected consequences for the definition of news. News is usually thought of as something current and topical—of interest to a large number of people. When the media report on an event, it becomes news. Expecting the news to come to us turns this idea on its head. Something becomes news when it is widely shared and starts appearing on our networks, not when it was published. New Yorkers learned this lesson in February 2014, when they started coming across warnings that a severe blizzard was about to hit the city. The story on Gawker warned of up to thirty inches of snow for New York City. With hundreds sharing the story, it became a trending item on Gawker, drawing even more attention to it.
In the end, New York was not buried in snow that weekend, even though the story was true. People sharing it had failed to notice the date of the story in small print above the headline. It had been published in February 2013, and readers had been passing it on without checking the date of publication. This happens all too often, but it is easy to blame people for failing to note when a story was published.
Much of what is reported in the media has a short shelf life. But stories can gain new life online, well after their sell-by date. Old news frequently becomes news again when it appears in the daily stream of stories that flow across social networks. It is news because it is new to us. Sharing transfers the power to decide the news of the day to the audience. Equally, it transfers the responsibility to assess the timeliness and currency of the material flowing across our timelines.
The rise of social networks as sources for news adds a further twist to the way we learn about the world. What is novel is that people get the news on Facebook even when they are not deliberately trying to find out what’s happening. Most stumble across news items on Facebook by accident. They see the news while they are doing other things—chatting with friends, looking at family photos or updating their status. As one person told the Pew researchers, “News on Facebook is just something that happens.” The good news is that some people are being exposed to the news who might otherwise not be. But as Chapter 3 illustrated, not all types of news are deemed worthy of sharing, and that affects the range of information that people stumble across.
One of the selling points of the daily newspaper was that it contained a wide selection of news and information designed to be of interest to a broad audience. The serious and important shared inches of column space with the amusing and frivolous, even if a reader ignored the dry stuff. On Facebook, the editors who decide what matters are members of our social circles, and they want to amuse. The most common type of news on Facebook is about entertainment.
We shouldn’t be too dismissive about the editorial choices of our connections. There is substance alongside the inconsequential. Pew found that two-thirds of Americans regularly come across news on Facebook about people and events in their community. Just over half stumble on national news and just under half encounter stories about local government and politics. Our friends, it seems, are not completely obsessed with the fluff.
More people than ever before are taking on the job of editors, filtering and selecting what is important, interesting or diverting. Traditionally, the role of gatekeeper fell to professional journalists who decided what was worthy of being reported on and published and what should be dismissed and ignored. Thousands of journalists continue to do this on a daily basis. The Internet was supposed to do away with the idea of gatekeepers who guided the flow of news and information. It was a revolutionary technology that would let citizens bypass these established editorial gates. Instead, we have all become gatekeepers for our social circles, adding an extra layer of control in deciding whether something in the paper merits attention.
The mainstream media itself has been complicit in sharing editorial control. It is hard to encounter an online news story that doesn’t urge us to give an item a thumbs-up, to recommend it or send it on by email. A study of 138 daily newspapers in the U.S., from big national papers to small local ones, showed that virtually all offered a way for readers to exercise editorial sway by sharing stories online. Readers have been recruited as digital paperboys to deliver the news to their friends, helping to increase the reach of a publication. We do this as the news industry has made it easier for us to do what we have always done: tell others about that thought-provoking, remarkable or quirky story in the news. Clicking a Like button requires much less work than clipping an item from the paper and sticking it in the mail, so we do it much more often.
Facebook makes it a virtue to share, but that doesn’t mean we always see what our friends are recommending. The social network uses algorithms to judge what might be of most interest. The lines of computer code decide the prominence of items on the news feed, meaning that some of your friends see more of your posts than others. They work as behind-the-scenes editors, which the company argues identify the most relevant material for each individual. But Facebook’s use of filtering algorithms is contentious. As with other tech giants who use algorithms, how they work is a commercial secret. The everyday user has little idea how Facebook acts as an intermediary, making editorial choices on his or her behalf. Journalists and researchers are increasingly scrutinizing the values embedded in the code of algorithms.
The question is how the new gatekeepers are affecting the mix in our daily news diet. The most active sharers tend to watch more local, national and cable news. Research in the U.S. suggests that people regularly see news on six or more different topics when they while away the hours on Facebook. In Canada, too, people who are active on social media tend to draw from a wide range of news sources. Yet the persistent concern is that one gets a narrower view of the world when it is filtered by friends and acquaintances. Social networks tend to bring people together around shared values and interests, connecting us to others like us. Such tendencies, though, are not due to technology. They are down to human behaviour.
Ever wondered where the expression “sour grapes” comes from? It’s from an Aesop’s fable that sheds light on how we make certain judgments, even when things point in a different direction. The fable features a hungry fox that cannot get what it wants. It sees some grapes hanging high on a vine, but no matter what it does, the fruit remains out of range. In frustration, the fox concludes they must be sour grapes and not worth eating. The fox falls victim to cognitive dissonance, a concept American sociologist Leon Festinger put forward in his influential book published in 1975, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance means rationalizing a choice in the face of the contrary evidence. The fox tries to rationalize its inability to reach the grapes by deciding they are sour. Humans are subject to the same limitation. We tend to seek information that supports our beliefs and assumptions, that fits with our view of the world. Conversely, we try to avoid details that increase our mental discomfort. Through selective exposure, we favour information that reinforces pre-existing beliefs and avoid information that would challenge our beliefs and attitudes.
Selective exposure is why a Republican voter in the U.S. would be more likely to read a right-leaning newspaper, listen to conservative talk radio or watch the Fox News Channel. Selective exposure is an instinctive human activity. For early humans, knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore was a matter of life and death. In modern society, selective exposure comes into play in what the researchers call a “low-energy armchair behaviour”—entertainment activities such as watching TV. Viewers tend to choose media that meet and reinforce their preconceptions and prejudices and avoid ideas that challenge them. But does that mean that the Internet and social media are making us more insular, paying attention only to news from people like us?
Even before Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, prominent thinkers were sounding the alarm. In his 2007 book Republic.com 2.0, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein described a future where we could filter media with perfect accuracy. We would only receive the information we wanted, connect with people like us and avoid what we disliked. For him, “the imagined world of innumerable, diverse editions of the Daily Me is not a utopian dream, and it would create serious problems from the democratic point of view.” The consequences of the “Daily Me,” in Sunstein’s view, would be a more fragmented, polarized and intolerant society.
It may never have been easier to craft a news diet to fit a particular view of the world and avoid opposing viewpoints or ignore important but dull news, such as local council decisions. Newspapers, television and radio have traditionally been viewed as providing shared experiences for communities as everyone reads the same news. “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” said playwright Arthur Miller in 1961, summing up the ideal view of the press as a unifying force for good in society. For some, social media is the antithesis of the newspaper, allowing people to live in filter bubbles and echo chambers online. The prominent New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof was one of the many voices sounding the alarm. Taking as his starting point the demise of the print edition of a West Coast newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in March 2009, he wrote that, online, “we may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.”
Figuring out whether people are retreating into their own filter bubbles is a complicated business. Social media does reinforce homophily—our tendency to associate with others with similar characteristics and interests—as it makes it simpler for like individuals to find each other. Homophily plays out at school and at work, as we seek out and connect with others with whom we share similar characteristics and interests. Individuals who interact frequently are alike and are increasingly likely to share similar information from similar sources, effectively narrowing their diet of news. Social networks can foster our inclination to share and receive from like-minded connections. Researchers have found that homophily is common on Twitter, above all when it comes to controversial and divisive issues. Whenever the conversation turns to politics, two polarized crowds tend to emerge on Twitter, frequently divided along liberal and conservative lines. Each group shares its own distinct set of links and comments. But the people who talk politics on Twitter are not representative of the millions of daily users. They are a concentrated number of politically active citizens.
Twitter helps to reinforce group identity, but different types of conversations bring together a varied mix of groups. Professionals or hobbyists connect with each other over a common topic to form tightly knit clusters. At other times, individuals come together because of a shared interest in a brand or celebrity to form a fragmented crowd that has little else in common. In contrast, tighter circles form around people and topics in the news, just like people cluster around different stalls at a market. Social networks are predicated on common interests, but to dismiss them as echo chambers is to deny that we all have diverse interests. Moreover, there are also signs that the way information travels on digital social networks may counter our predilection for selective exposure and instead nurture a diversity of information.
The way information travels on digital networks mirrors how it spreads by word of mouth. A recommendation from a trusted friend carries more weight than that of a casual contact. Thanks to homophily, people close to each other tend to have similar interests, so a piece of information may be more relevant. The same dynamics are at play on social media. Researchers at the School of Information at the University of Michigan worked with Facebook to study the sharing patterns of more than 250 million users from 236 countries over two months in 2010. The results showed that people were more likely to share a post, photo or link from a close contact than one from a casual acquaintance.
On the face of it, this would lend weight to arguments that social networks serve as echo chambers. However, digging deeper into the numbers revealed that the vast majority of material shared on Facebook came from loose ties—people we vaguely know, or whom we knew at school or met in passing years back. It turns out they play a fundamental function as social filters. The reason for this lies in math.
Individuals have strong ties with a small number of close friends, but weak ties with a much larger number of more distant connections. Even though we will share less from weak ties, there are more of them than there are of close friends. The much larger number of these distant contacts means that weak ties account for the majority of information spread on Facebook. The sheer abundance of weak ties means most information comes not from our closest friends but from distant connections.
Here’s the math: Mary has 100 friends who are weak ties and ten who are strong ties. The likelihood that Mary will share a link from a close friend is high—around 50 per cent. But the chance she will share something from a casual friend is much lower—around 15 per cent. If 10 close friends share a link, Mary will share five links, or half of them. If 100 friends share something, the chances of it being passed on are lower, at 15 per cent. But 15 per cent of 100 is fifteen, so Mary ends up sharing more from these loose connections.
“Since these distant contacts tend to be different from us, the bulk of information we consume and share comes from people with different perspectives,” explained Eytan Bakshy, one of the Michigan researchers who went on to join Facebook. Other computer scientists have come up with similar conclusions. A team at Beihang University in Beijing analyzed sharing on YouTube and Facebook. Loose connections turned out to be crucial to the widespread circulation of information. Take them out of the equation, as the scientists did, and the spread falls dramatically. The weak ties serve as bridges between different communities, helping information jump from one social circle to another.
Online social networks are built around weak ties, mirroring the way social networks behave in the physical world. The importance of weak ties was first noted in 1973 by the American sociologist Mark Granovetter. In the influential paper The Strength of Weak Ties, he showed how an individual was far more likely to hear about a job from people he or she saw only occasionally or rarely than from close friends. In tight-knit groups, everyone tends to share and know the same stuff. But a casual acquaintance moves in different social circles and is likely to know different stuff. As a result, casual acquaintances, rather than close friends, are the leading source for new ideas and information.
The same dynamics are amplified online. It is easier to maintain loose connections, keeping up with past school friends, work colleagues or old acquaintances. The ease of online sharing creates a situation where the time and effort required to keep some kind of connection with weak ties alive is much lower than in an analogue world—a simple click will suffice. Out of the 229 “friends” the average American has on Facebook, a third are people whom they vaguely know or knew in the past. Having distant connections introduces a degree of serendipity. “The findings suggest that there is little validity to concerns that people who use social networking sites experience smaller social networks, less closeness, or are exposed to less diversity,” concluded a 2011 Pew report.
In the stacks at the library of the British Museum in London are copies of the Evening Post, the first evening newspaper in England, published in 1706. These early newspapers regularly left space at the end of the third page for people to add personal observations before sending it on to relatives in the country. The fourth page was blank so that the paper might be folded and addressed like an ordinary letter. (One newspaper referenced this in its full and rather cumbersome title: the London Post, with the best Account of the whole Week’s News, Foreign and Domestick; with Room left to write into the Country without the Charge of Double Postage.) The Evening Post of August 10, 1710, bears a handwritten message from Thomas Walter to his brother William, who was at the family’s estate in Chatham on the outskirts of London. Thomas brings to his brother’s attention a report in the newspaper about price fluctuations in bank stock.
Thomas also added more personal messages. He describes his trip to London as “my worst passage” and writes that he has sent their mother “those things she desired.” Other editions of the newspapers have messages to their father, Gabriel Walter.
Three centuries later, the descendants of the Walter family are probably adding their own observations to the news. Once again, they have the power to make editorial judgments for others on material that merits attention. But here’s the paradox: we pick, choose and share more news and information than ever before, yet at the same time we expect to be told about what matters. Our behaviour challenges the notion of an informed citizenry that keeps abreast of events around them and is able to make educated choices based on accurate and reliable information.
The amount of news available at any time in any place on any piece of gear is overwhelming. There are so many news outlets filling airtime 24/7 to keep audiences watching, listening and clicking by squeezing just a little bit more from the day’s events. Some of it is meaningful, but too much is PR masquerading as news. The important stuff is lost in the noise.
In his 1998 book, The Good Citizen, American journalism scholar Michael Schudson argued that the world had become too complex for citizens to be well informed about everything all the time, especially when it comes to public affairs. Schudson put forward the idea of the monitorial citizen. Instead of expecting citizens to be following everything, Schudson recommends that they should scan events around them and respond when required, similar to how parents act when watching over their children at a swimming pool.
When we select what to send on to friends, we are acting as monitorial citizens. There is a difference between deliberately taking on such a role and assuming it as a result of everyday actions. A minority of people go to the trouble of recommending stories on Facebook, ranging from a third in Italy and Spain to a fifth in the U.S. and less than a tenth in Germany and Japan. Many more, though, get their news from websites. Clicking to read a news story online is a way of voting for that item, and those decisions are often unwittingly shared with others.
Gatekeeping decisions are made visible to all by tools that aggregate editorial picks, such as the lists of most read or most emailed stories on news websites. Personal choices gain greater authority when they are seen collectively and reach beyond social circles to a much wider audience. As with the Sochi Olympics of 2014 and presidential debates of 2012, individual voices and actions, made visible and amassed through social networks, can shape how news is presented and understood.