Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Is Facebook the Real Global Newspaper?


That was the question posed recently by The Atlantic.

From the piece...

The emergence of Facebook as a real driver of news stories tells us something important about how news works. Getting our news from our friends is nothing new. It's as old as the concept of neighborhood gossip. But if Hitwise analytics are capturing a true trend in media, and the share of Facebook outbound links really doubled in the last six months, it paints the picture of an increasingly nichefied world of news readers. Friends are reading what their friends are reading, who are reading what their friends are reading, and so on. It presages the deterioration of top-down news, and the rise of news-reading groups whose news sources and opinions become a centripetal, self-perpetuated cycle of information -- or disinformation.

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