Professor Owen R. Youngman teaches a great course about Understanding Media by Understanding Google, but maybe he should consider a follow-up: Understanding Media by Understanding Facebook. Ravi Somaiya explains in The New York Times how Facebook is changing the way its users consume journalism. For quite some time media experts have been talking about the ‘unbundling’ of news – the fact that people no longer want to buy complete newspapers or magazines, but focus on individual stories which they find through search and social networks. What they ‘consume’ is determined at least partially by the algorithms used by Google and Facebook. It seems that the unbundling is happening right now.
Aaron Sankin posted on The Kernel a story about how Facebook is ‘wrecking political news’. In his opinion, the ‘trending topics’ feature on Facebook causes media to surf along whatever is ‘trending’ in order to attract the crowds they need for their traffic and advertizing revenues. Not only the choice of the topics is debatable, also the fact that stories are published in a hurry in order to benefit from the momentum leads to particularly bad journalism.
These are issues which should be discussed in both courses I’m following right now: the above mentioned Understanding Media by Understanding Google but also the Connected Courses which studies education and web culture. Facebook is changing online culture in very important but not always very visible ways. The world of blogs, RSS-feeds, social bookmarks and probably even web-based search is increasingly being replaced by a very different environment dominated by mobile social networks.
This work by rolandlegrand is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Wait until the day where academics have given away all their content to xMOOC companies for free, or made this a habit. Then Facebook and the like can come in, partner with those companies, and deliver education for free via drones, balloons etc.The press, academia etc, by being obsessed with the reach afforded by tech companies, are shoehorning themselves into tighter and tighter financially disadvantageous situations.
Yes Paul-Olivier, unless of course education means more than consuming multi-media content, but also means personal contacts and apprenticeships.