The Demise Of Social Media And The Return Of Mass Media. Posted by Tom Foremski - April 4, 2011 There have been quite a few studies lately on what people Tweet and post on Facebook, and the large number of links that people share. Invariably, the links that most people share belong to large media organizations -- what used to be called mass-media. For example, Nate Silver recently analyzed links to news sources and found that of the top 30 news sources, nearly all were traditional large news sites such as AP or New York Times, only TMZ and Politico were new. A recent Yahoo! Research report found just 20,000 elite Twitter users produce 50% of Tweets (Twitter has 150 m users).
[Study Shows How Social Media Amplifies Mass Media - SVW] Yet we seem to have convinced ourselves that we are living in the age of "social media" where citizen journalists are producing tons of great content and upsetting the balance of power in the media world. Where? Where is the social media? People are behaving like an online newspaper delivery boy. Please see: Some Thoughts On The Social Distribution Of Mass Media...(SoDOMM) Posted by Tom Foremski - April 7, 2011 (Photo shows a meeting of the seminal Homebrew Computing Club - credit: Computer History Museum.) Earlier this week I pointed out how "social media" has changed from its original promise of challenging the established order of mass media.
Where are the brigades of citizen journalists? What's become of the hope of the grass roots revolt against the gate keepers in our national and local media? When I left the Financial Times in mid-2004 to become the first journalist to leave a major newspaper and become an independent "journalist-blogger" there was a lot of hope in the air. Just as the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members such as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates, took a hobby of building microcomputers and helped build a new industry that toppled the behemoths of their age, there was a similar feeling in the air. No longer did you need to be a Press Baron, buying ink by the tanker, and having hugely expensive printing plants. Please see: Rupert Murdoch And The SoDOMM Effect In Social Media. Posted by Tom Foremski - July 7, 2011 Today's news of the demise of The News of the World newspaper was both shocking and exhilarating: that a 168 year old Sunday newspaper with more than 200 staff, selling almost 3 million copies a week, can be closed so suddenly is without precedence.
The News of the World was the first newspaper I bought. I was about seven or eight years old and decided I needed to get serious about life and that I needed to know what was going on the world. I looked around the newsagents for something that could tell me the news of the world, and here was a newspaper that described perfectly what I wanted. My precious pocket money purchased an issue and I took it home and studied it. But I couldn't find any news of the world in it! I decided to postpone my investigation of the adult world and went back to buying my favorite comic book "The Eagle" (above) and its science fiction tales of adventure and heroism. Savviest media mogul... From Wikipedia: Social media's role... Study Shows How Social Media Amplifies Mass Media. Posted by Tom Foremski - March 28, 2011 Social media is touted by many as a way to get around the gatekeepers of media, the traditional old order of mass media setting the agenda for society has been tipped onto its head.
Not really. A study from Yahoo! Research "Who Says What to Whom on Twitter | Yahoo! Research" found this: We find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter—roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users—where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. And as for diversity of opinion? We also find significant homophily within categories: celebrities listen to celebrities, while bloggers listen to bloggers etc... It's an interesting scientific paper. Proof for Two-Step Flow Theory The study analyzed 5 billion tweets and examined the relationship between users. It found that there are about 20,000 "elite" users that are the source for 50% of Tweets but they rely on a large number of intermediaries, about 500K. The Demise Of Social Media And The Return Of Mass Media.