Mainstream media gushes over Facebook meme
Major newspapers and news sites have suddenly jumped on a bandwagon for a supposed Facebook ‘craze’ for posting 25 personal facts. It’s a curious example of the way the media machine operates.
It’s no secret that news stories from one outlet will be picked up by others. Sometimes it’s just a case of everyone working from the same news agency reports or covering an obvious diary event, but often it’s down to a chain reaction of reporters seeing an interesting story which their own audience might not have already heard about. (And, yes, that does include tech blogs such as Blorge, though we do aim to add analysis and comment.)
That effect certainly seems to have taken hold this week. Within the space of a few days, such media giants as the New York Times, Washington Post, MSNBC, USA Today and Chicago Tribune have all covered the ‘news’ that the entire Internet is apparently going crazy for a fad where users post 25 random facts about themselves.
Unfortunately that’s it. That’s the entire story.
The extent of the evidence the main news reports offer for this being any more significant than any other Facebook craze is as follows: a company spokeswoman says the number of notes posted on the site has doubled in the past week and that, “anecdotally I’ve never seen a note spread as quickly as this has on Facebook.”
If you want hard numbers, the New York Times report says five million notes have been posted on Facebook in the past week and ‘many’ of these involve the 25 facts list. It even trots out the most tiresome tool in 21st century journalism: quoting how many results a particular phrase throws up in Google.
It appears one mainstream outlet noted the fad (MSNBC as far as I can tell) and everyone else then ran stories on it out of fear that they were missing some important trend.
But is this really mainstream news? Is the entire internet really going crazy? Well, bearing in mind that one man’s experience is an incredible limited measuring stick, I’d say approximately 3 percent of my Facebook friends have posted a list. Some other friends have made comments on a list. But I can’t see any reason why this is going to make any different to the way we live our online lives. Here in Britain at least, it’s dwarfed by the number of people posting pictures of their children playing in the snow.
Give it a week or two and posting 25 facts will probably be as long forgotten as posting the fifth line of page 56 of the nearest book to your computer.
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February 7th, 2009
You’ve got to wonder about the media sometimes. In the midst of a global financial crisis, this is news?