Does social media connect or separate communities? (With apologies to Ian Hamilton Finlay and Little Sparta)
Distraction. I should be working but Googling alerts me to a poll on the Guardian’s Edinburgh blog. Should the Old Odeon become a Wetherspoons pub? By the time I vote (no, of course) and leave a comment the story has slipped down screen and out of sight.
New media tends to runs in vertical lines. Blogging and tweeting are streams of information that flow quickly down, and off, the screen. Out of sight. The issue hasn’t gone away, it’s just shoved out of mind by the next story. If you want to know more you can find it somewhere online but that takes time, effort and the inclination to check facts and make connections between related incidents and issues.
That’s the shortcoming of hyperactive ‘hyperlocal’ news. By creating smaller and smaller circles of readers, social media may just as often divide and fragment communities as it connects them.
Having said that, I confess to being a social media addict: I blog therefore I am. I spend hours Googling. I tweet and retweet, I post daft YouTube links on Facebook, sometimes just for fun, sometimes seriously and I occasionally get the treat of a conversation with like-minded souls (friends and strangers). But there are times when I find myself longing for the days when reliable local news came spread across a page horizontally and hung around long enough for you to absorb the information. We called it a newspaper.
Lines in the sand on Canna, waves make them and wash them away.
Newspapers are not quite dead yet (though some are giving a good impression of it) and I am glad to see an odd symbiotic relationship between old and new media – that Andrew Lansley rap would probably not be clocking up more than a quarter of a million YouTube hits (and counting) if it had not been for the mention in the Guardian newspaper.
Meanwhile, by the way, the Guardian Edinburgh poll shows a majority of people in favour of saving the Odeon. By much more than one vote.
“By creating smaller and smaller circles of readers, social media may just as often divide and fragment communities as it connects them”
clique clack
yackety-yack
outta my face
get off my back
welcome welcome
one and all
from the worldwide web
to the parish small
I like Little Sparta but must say social media leaves me cold.