I am currently undertaking a research project for my masters dissertation entitled ‘How are new social media making scientific controversies public?’. As part of this project, I am currently doing a review of the literature in this area. One article which has really caught my eye is written by Nesbit and Scheufele. It focuses in on the idea that new medias such as blogging are allowing audiences to sub-consciously narrow the news that they directly receive.
They have identified three trends:
1. A proliferation of niche channels – Highly specialized online information environments leading to an increasing fractionalization of news choices and audiences. As more recent research shows, these fragmented news environments have the potential to produce more apathy among some segments of the electorate and more polarization across the population overall.
2. Algorithms as editors – Increasing shift toward online presentation of news, even amongst traditional news outlets. This has provided media organizations with real-time metrics of audience preferences and the ability to make decisions about news selection and placement based on these metrics. Increasing the influence that reader preferences have on story selection and placement also increases the likelihood of a spiral of mutual reinforcement. In other words, stories that readers selectively attend to will be placed more prominently on news web sites, which – in turn – increases the odds of readers finding them in the first place. This makes it easy for readers to select content based on popularity, interest, or political identity; opting out of the professional hierarchy of front page headlines and lead stories that might appear in a printed newspaper or broadcast.
3. Self-reinforcing search and tagging spirals: The notion of reinforcing spirals is exacerbated in online search environments where search engine rankings and search suggestions can heavily influence the overall information infrastructure. The process depends not only on the algorithms used by search engines but also on the tagging and optimization strategies pursued by news content providers, aggregators, bloggers, and interest groups. The guidance provided by Google search suggestions is likely to disproportionately drive traffic, regardless of the content available, and create a self-reinforcing spiral that reduces the complexity and diversity of the information that citizens encounter online.
They hypothesise that we may be moving toward a society where we are less and less exposed to disagreement and viewpoints that are different from our own. Being part of highly like-minded networks, in other words, may exacerbate the effects of individual-level selectivity and produce an even more fine-grained filter for incoming information. Journalists and other professional groups such as scientists are likely to be part of this attitude polarization; since these groups tend to be disproportionately like-minded in their political outlook, are heavier users of online news sources and social media; and face greater demands on their time in managing and using information.
All very interesting ideas, and I can definitely see where they’re coming from. In a way, we all partake in this kind of selectivity. We naturally choose to read stories that may be of interest to us – even if it’s just sub-consciously, through searching google with the words ‘climate change’ for example. Yes, that type of search would throw up many results, but would we read all of them? Or would we just choose the one thats title looks most interesting, or relevant to the way that we think?
So why is this important? Well, it could have potentially huge influences on the future of important issues. We only have to take into consideration the huge furore that surrounded ‘climate-gate’. Where did that come from and where did it end up? It started when the emails were leaked and discussed by climate sceptics on their blogs. In fact, it was discussed for a few days initially in the blogosphere before it became global news. When it became mainstream news, where had journalists with little information on the actual situation get their info from? Blogs.
I think personally the most concerning thing is that more and more people are turning to the internet for their daily source of news. There’s nothing wrong with using the internet, in fact, the internet is there to provide information to a wide source of people and should allow everyone to be on a level playing field with knowledge in take. But the stats are scary. 75% of online news consumers say that the news they read is forwarded onto them through their social network – via email or posts on Facebook/Twitter. That’s an awful lot of news simply pushed onto people. Forty million americans (I don’t have UK stats) log onto the internet to gain their daily news and scientific information.
The benefits of the internet are that within seconds you can have the information you want/need and then you can log off and that’s that. It’s also free. When you buy a newspaper, yes you can skim read through most of it, or you can just choose to ignore bits of it, but at least its there, right in front of you. When you pick up a newspaper, its highly unlikely that you turn straight to page 14 and then that’s it. You at least have a flick through most, if not all of the pages, but you take in other headlines, other images, in fact other people’s views.
I suppose the point of this blog entry, was just to share an interesting article to people who might be interested. Although I’m pretty sure I’m about to myself, enter into trend 3. By tagging this post with various words that may attract the reader into viewing it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the article in question here was forwarded on to me by a colleague through an email.
You see my point. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and leave me feedback if you fancy.
Jack.
I am a freelance environmental author with an MSc and BSc in Environmental Sciences from The University of East Anglia. Just trying to develop social media as an effective platform for communicating and engaging with people on all things green... Please get in touch with me if you are interested, I am willing to discuss any proposals.
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