I have growing doubts in this the advent of social media that this constant production of, and then echo after, of information rattling around the corridors of the Internet is an entirely positive thing.
Could an animal survive and thrive if it had extremely sensitive ears but couldn’t discern where the sounds were coming from? Perceiving the sound is only part of the equation. Answering the follow up questions in a split second is the other part. Where did the sound come from? When did it occur? What made it? Should I take action?
I’m sharing this observation because it seems like every time something (of any quality) is posted to a social media outlet / site it gets picked up somewhere else, and rebroadcast from that site, where other sites and bloggers pick it up and rebroadcast it yet again. It finally makes its way to the outer reaches of the ether and back again, often mutated. And this can all happen within a few hours. I think I’ll call this Social Media Echo.
For many content creators (authors) in the social media universe this is a great thing (i.e. SEO, exposure, and the like). But if listeners are going to make sense of this information they need to answer the above questions. Where did this come from? When did it appear? Who is making it? Should I take notice?
At least for future (and ongoing) research in any field, a more linear or trackable system for organizing and categorizing sources of new information that’s being posted every day would remove much of the haze that current aggregators, meta-bloggers and psuedo-news services are unintentionally producing. Wouldn’t it be nice (to quote the Beach Boys) if we could quickly know the original author and site location from an iron-clad aggregator and see all its echo patterns in other sites and services. Then we could quickly answer those important questions and stop walking in circles in a dark room, reaching for door knobs of authority.
Is it just me? I guess it’s time to write a plug-in, unless anyone has heard of such an aggregator filter.
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No! It’s definitely not just you. You’ve made a great point and it’s something that I have also been noticing.
In fact, I actually waste a lot of time tracing stories and quotes back to their original authors and the problem seems to be getting worse. Information on the ‘Net requires a certain amount of basic skepticism—even when you feel certain you’ve found the authority, it can easily turn out to be a well-crafted hoax. If there was an actual, dependable authority aggregator available, I’d be first to install/use it!
An interesting reference to such a beasty here:
http://gapingvoid.com/2006/04/23/authority-aggregator/
thanks, zack! it’s great to know ‘i’m not alone’.
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