Media Schmedia

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, media, social media, news, fake news, sharing

Everything has a life cycle. I can't recall what I expected when I saw All Your Friends Like This: How Social Networks Took Over News. It has three authors, Hal Crawford, Andrew Hunter, and Domagoj Filipovic, who were colleagues at nine.com.au, formerly ninemsn, an Australian online news website that is a lot like Google News might be if it were on its own.

Folks in the vaunted Northern hemisphere pay little attention to what goes on "down under", but these fellows appear to have gotten a finger on the pulse of a generation, learned what it means, and run with it. How do you measure the relative effectiveness of a new style of media? There is the obvious metric: newspapers are going broke, broadcast media are scrambling to keep from dropping off the ratings chart, newsroom staffs are shrinking, and even mediocre podcasts are apparently reaching larger audiences than large TV networks.

These guys wanted something more, and hit upon measuring Shares on FaceBook and related vehicles (I used to think the "News Feed" at FB was a bit of a joke, but I've noticed that its news content is growing). They produced a site (or method?) called Share Wars, and Mr. Filipovic developed a software system, Likeable, that scrapes social media news feeds to gather sharing statistics. It was available for public access until mid-2016, but is now in the background of the trends they report.

The book chronicles these aspects of the replacement of "push" media with "personal push" media, driven by the Share buttons we find on every web site purporting to convey newsworthy items. Publishing is now so easy and pervasive, it has of course greatly increased the production and distribution of lies and scams including "fake news" (which isn't news at all: a lie by any other name is still a lie). When one of the authors spoke of his "War of the Worlds" moment, I realized that "fake news" has been around as long as "real news".

I don't know what else to say. It is a very interesting book, but didn't resonate with me the way I'd hoped. Buggy whips are still being manufactured, but as a specialty item for history buffs and collectors of horse-drawn vehicles. The Times (of wherever) will be with us for a long time, but the introduction of Sharing has changed the landscape of all media, forever, or at least until something even more compelling arrives. Maybe Crawford, Hunter and Filipovic can help us see the next big change coming.