The Language of Participation
The Economist published an interesting note on social news within its latest Technology Quarterly. It addresses the emerging role of this new media form and provides a capsule with most of the relevant facts using the two most prominent examples of traditional and social news websites: The New York Times Digital and Digg.com.
Beyond the numbers that favor traditional outlets in terms of traffic and the fact that yes, Digg and other social news sites draw most of their content from established publishers; the comparison might not be fair. In fact, we could consider this attempt to put these two media forms side by side misleading. To begin with (and this is acknowledged in the article), Digg and other social news sites do not produce content, that alone sets them aside into its own category. The new breed of social news sites are mere facilitators, leveraging technology to exploit the social megamind that is the internet (see more details on a previous post).
Outside of the question of whether or not these two sites can be compared, the article opens the door for a much more meaningful discussion centered on the layer of meaning attached to social news sites or any other collaborative effort to distribute information over the internet (i.e. Wikipedia.org).
What are the implications of consuming information that has been brought to you by a community of readers (collective intelligence) as opposed to an editor? Is it more credible? Less credible? Just acknowledging the fact that some of these questions (and others in the same vein) are valid will lead us to accept the existence of that layer of meaning asssociated with collective intelligence and that has the potential to alter how we understand and perceive news information. This is essential to see the value of social news sites and their impact in modern readers.
