Why in the Age of the Selfie We Need to Look at the Big Picture.
- Apr 25, 2014
- 3 min read
Twitter has just launched their new cover page and is moving towards Facebook algorithms. This ensures you’ll see certain types of Tweets more than others. Facebook, as you may well know, already uses these algorithms so you’ll only see a very small percentage of posts from people on your friend’s list – in fact, in general, you only see about 16 % of their posts.
So for example the New York Times, as of this writing, has 6.7 million fans which may sound like a lot but means a little over just a million people are seeing their posts at any one given time. In addition, you only get updates from people who you most regularly interact with on Facebook. So if you don’t share, like or comment on anything the New York Times posts then it will eventually fade from your news feed. I only use the times as an example, but you may well like Fox News or CNBC or Democracy Now or Pravda. The point is if we like that cute picture of our friend's puppy and not that tragic accident that killed hundreds of people or the war games going on in the Russian-Ukraine boarder then the news will slowly fade away from our feed.
This is a big problem because according to the Pew Research Center one in every three Americans get the majority of their news from Facebook. Now I have to admit that Facebook is often the place where I read about things first. The death of a celebrity for example, or the latest score from my hockey team. I am certainly not immune to the lure of social media either.
Because of the algorithms, we only get information from people who we closest to and that’s not the point of journalism at all. News is supposed to give us information from around the world, from people we’ve never met, from people we’ve never spoken to. It’s supposed to broaden our horizons, but instead it is shrinking them by increased customization to serve marketing purposes.
Facebook is struggling to launch an app called Paper which combines news events with updates with our friends. The app tracks the information that we’re interested in and gives us more information on those updates and completely ignores hard hitting journalism. For example if we take these algorithms to the extreme, the world might not know about how the NSA tapes phone conversations or monitors emails – a story that just won the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious journalism prize in America. Why? Because Facebook or its apps wouldn’t compute that this news was interesting to somebody who looks up sports stats or pays attention t the latest fashion trends. In fact the only type of person this story would show up as interesting to would likely be a conspiracy theorist.
This is why we cannot be complacent in our news gathering. We cannot only seek what we’ve viewed or read before. We should get news from our friends but we most also get them from newspapers and legitimate news sources. And yes, no newspaper is perfect but they at least try and give you a wider variety of what is actually happening in the world and not just the microcosm that is your life.
Written by Joel Mark Harris, author, journalist and filmmaker. Born and raised in Vancouver, please check out his latest thriller Shame the Devil
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