Surveys show that people are not really spending more time with news. Data from the Pew Project for the People and the Press in 2006 showed that the amount of time Americans spend with news is essentially flat - even online. That's not to say that some people won't go out of their way to put together a particular news diet, but the number of people who will do that will probably be few.And maybe that's for the best. Social networking news sites such as Digg are fun to visit, but it is easy to imagine how they could quickly lead to a view of the world just as insular as that of the MSM, and maybe more so - either stuck within the preferences of the Digg crowd or the preferences of a select few Digg members whose list of "diggs" one regularly checks.It's not that there's anything wrong with that, but if your concern is being trapped by the worldview of the MSM editors, how is the worldview of the crowd on one website really better?
Have you been 'digging' the news lately? - Yahoo! News
I don't know about this. I do agree that the end result of a site like Digg is that users only see news about what they want to see. This has interesting implications since, i'd imagine, many Digg users are quite young. I don't know if that is so terribly important, but there is the possibility that people will grow up completely unaware of what is happening outside their community. I know that because we watch so much user generated media, such as YouTube, etc..., on the computer my daughter didn't understand why we couldn't just find cartoons on the TV in the same way. Actually I don't really understand why we can't do that either.
Here's why I don't agree with the christian science monitor's assessment of Digg. Curiosity. Plain and simple. As Digg adds more categories, and gets a broader demographic of users, I'd say that you will indeed end up with what is truly the public's opinion on the front page of Digg. That could be a very interesting tool for politicians, etc. It could also help to advance the topics of the lesser heard, at least where I live, right wing. Not that I particulary want to hear what the right wing has to say. It usually hurts my ears, but I feel that it is always important to understand both sides of a story, so that you won't end up arguing a point that you don't fully know about.
In many ways, I think that the christian science monitor has a point. Right now, today, Digg will give you a very tech-heavy, left wing perspective on the news. For me that isn't a big deal because that is what I want to hear. However, when the right wing discovers Digg, I'll look forward to reading the comment section on some of those stories!
technorati tags:digg, politics, big, media, narrow, world, view, technology, future
Blogged with Flock
No comments:
Post a Comment