Science News: Social media news consumers at higher risk of 'information bubbles'
Warning: the topic starts out with a poorly-phrased title for the scientific paper and the concept trips over words in that way quite a bit. Hopefully the explanation we present here will help clarify the point and it's an important one due to the threat to free and open news.
The idea of an 'information bubble' is strong but using that term to define it doesn't help much. Although we doubt an 'information bubble' applies in any other context but, regarding news, the information bubble is the number of people going to single points for news in social networks. The contrast is to the size of 'information bubbles' outside social networks where people typically use search engines to find more disparate news sources.
My explanation is still kind of impenetrable and here's a graphic from the article which may help somewhat:
The colored dots represent information bubbles with 'a' and 'c' representing searches on the open Internet and 'b' and 'd' representing news searches on social networks. If you consider 'b' and 'd' in terms of the biggest bubbles representing CNN and Fox, the difference is evident relative to 'a' and 'b' in which the reliance on single sources is much less apparent.
It's questionable how much sense the intro revealed to you so another way to look at it is the cloistering of people around single news networks. This has been evident with Fox News for years during which it has been largely impossible to talk to anyone who locks onto Fox because they don't typically consider other news sources and don't believe them.
You can see more of the phenomenon in the rejection out-of-hand of Russia Today and frequently al Jazeera as well, although not quite as much, because these represent Commie or Muslim propaganda. Any time a news source is rejected for reasons other than incompetence, there is a problem and it's not simply with right-wing extremism centered on Fox News.
Liberals do the same thing within social networks as many are constantly bleating the Party line for Clinton and / or giving lectures on things liberals already know. I started dumping these people along with the Fox parrots some while ago and it's done my life no harm whatsoever.
In other words and this is the key point to all of this: people on social networks are not typically looking for news but rather agreement. This may well be the most destructive threat to dissemination of news America has ever faced.
Here at the Rockhouse, we use CNN, Fox, The Guardian, Russia Today, and al Jazeera for primary resources regarding world news and another newsreader program is used for more esoteric material such as finding the information bubbles article. We would like to find material with which we agree but the point of the pursuit is finding truth rather than agreement. If there is agreement with our thinking, so much the better.
Warning: the topic starts out with a poorly-phrased title for the scientific paper and the concept trips over words in that way quite a bit. Hopefully the explanation we present here will help clarify the point and it's an important one due to the threat to free and open news.
The idea of an 'information bubble' is strong but using that term to define it doesn't help much. Although we doubt an 'information bubble' applies in any other context but, regarding news, the information bubble is the number of people going to single points for news in social networks. The contrast is to the size of 'information bubbles' outside social networks where people typically use search engines to find more disparate news sources.
My explanation is still kind of impenetrable and here's a graphic from the article which may help somewhat:
The colored dots represent information bubbles with 'a' and 'c' representing searches on the open Internet and 'b' and 'd' representing news searches on social networks. If you consider 'b' and 'd' in terms of the biggest bubbles representing CNN and Fox, the difference is evident relative to 'a' and 'b' in which the reliance on single sources is much less apparent.
It's questionable how much sense the intro revealed to you so another way to look at it is the cloistering of people around single news networks. This has been evident with Fox News for years during which it has been largely impossible to talk to anyone who locks onto Fox because they don't typically consider other news sources and don't believe them.
You can see more of the phenomenon in the rejection out-of-hand of Russia Today and frequently al Jazeera as well, although not quite as much, because these represent Commie or Muslim propaganda. Any time a news source is rejected for reasons other than incompetence, there is a problem and it's not simply with right-wing extremism centered on Fox News.
Liberals do the same thing within social networks as many are constantly bleating the Party line for Clinton and / or giving lectures on things liberals already know. I started dumping these people along with the Fox parrots some while ago and it's done my life no harm whatsoever.
In other words and this is the key point to all of this: people on social networks are not typically looking for news but rather agreement. This may well be the most destructive threat to dissemination of news America has ever faced.
Here at the Rockhouse, we use CNN, Fox, The Guardian, Russia Today, and al Jazeera for primary resources regarding world news and another newsreader program is used for more esoteric material such as finding the information bubbles article. We would like to find material with which we agree but the point of the pursuit is finding truth rather than agreement. If there is agreement with our thinking, so much the better.
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