Friends, Followers and the Future by Rory O'Connor

Friends, Followers and the Future by Rory O'Connor

Author:Rory O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
Published: 2012-04-02T00:00:00+00:00


9.

The New Breed of Media Researchers

A new wave of research into emerging media, information delivery, and web credibility, spurred by a new breed of academics, is upending the previously accepted conventional wisdom that online social networks tend less to persuasion and more to polarization, fragmentation and reinforcement of prior beliefs. The emerging social media, these researchers suggest, possess certain unique characteristics that enable them to function well as credibility content filters.

Northwestern University’s Eszter Hargittai, whose study of young Internet users revealed that most have a frightening lack of knowledge as to how brands like Google actually operate in the information sphere, is among those in the forefront of this movement. Along with BJ Fogg, Paul Resnick, Miriam Metzger, R. Kelly Garrett, Cliff Lampe and others, Hargittai believes social media now play a powerful role not only in distributing information but also in filtering it for trust. Their pioneering work, along with that of colleagues such as Danah Boyd and Judith Donath, both of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (see Chapter 10), also suggests that online social media networks introduce new elements of trust to the delivery of news and information.

Like Hargittai, Miriam Metzger of the University of California, Berkeley believes “social media can definitely play a role in trust filtering.” Metzger, whose research centers on Internet credibility issues, says, “There is an interesting phenomenon going on, where under certain circumstances, new media can actually be perceived as more credible than traditional media.” As one example, Metzger points to reporting about wildfires that had threatened her own neighborhood in California. “During the fires here, the news and information accessible from local social media such as Twitter, Facebook and blogs was more relevant, reliable and current than that on local television, which was broadcasting outdated official press releases,” Metzger recalls. “The traditional media was not perceived as useful. Meanwhile, the new interactive media was getting people information they really wanted and needed, in real time.”

Ohio State University’s Kelly Garrett, whose own social network research has convinced him “the filtering thesis sounds correct,” echoes Metzger’s remarks. Much of Garrett’s work focuses on the issue of “selective exposure,” whether or not people prefer to receive information that reinforces their opinions and to avoid information that challenges them. Garrett’s findings have important implications, as the abstract of one of his studies notes, “for individuals’ exposure to cross-cutting political ideas in a contemporary news environment that affords an unprecedented level of choice.” His research shows that “there is no evidence that individuals abandon news stories that contain information with which they disagree.”

Our informal Internet communications channels “are certainly expanding and becoming a more important part of the media diet,” Garrett says. “Twitter users report they are getting news from more eclectic groups than previously, for example. In the past, credentials were much more important. Now they are being supplanted by ‘crowdsourcing,’ or as in the case of Wikipedia, by a relatively small group of people with the skills they need and the time to do it.



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