alexandraerin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexandraerin) wrote2011-05-19 11:44 am
alexandraerin) wrote2011-05-19 11:44 am
Entry tags:
Cracking News
Okay, so eagle-eyed readers spotted that I put a reference to the MUniverse equivalent of a Cracked article into a recent chapter of Tales of MU. This is actually something of an anachronism, as the MU timeline as it was originally conceived was a bit behind ours in terms of any parallels.... the year 222 M.E. was chosen because I went to college 222 years after the American revolution was kicked off.
I love Cracked for a lot of reasons, but me being me, one of the reasons I love it is because it's a great indication of how big a game-changer the internet is. When I was growing up, Cracked was an inferior imitation of the venerable Mad Magazine. I loved Mad for being a source of consistently awesome and well-constructed and hilarious puns (also known as the only kind of puns there are) and also for being one of the two sources of information about transsexual/transgenderism that was available to a small-town kid when I was growing up.
(The other major source was TV shows and movies. In both cases, the information was the same: "This concept actually exists, and it is both hilarious and creepy." But you know what? That was better than not knowing it existed. Thinking oneself to be a kind of freak that actually exists out in the world is better than thinking oneself to simply be a freakish anomaly of a freak. This, of course, is another way that the internet is a game-changer.)
Nowadays, of course, Cracked is not an inferior knock-off of anything. They're not the only daily update humor site. I can't point to any one thing they definitively started doing before anyone else. But they do everything they do so well. And their articles have actually enriched my life in a few ways.
But of course, even a... fixed clock... is wrong... once a... okay, this metaphor doesn't work. The point is that everyone gets things wrong sometimes. Cracked as an entity has no viewpoint, it's made up of individual writers and outside submitters. But the one of those individual writers who came up with one of today's offerings, a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the way news spread across the internet in the wake of Osama's death, missed the mark, I believe.
He's talking about how we all follow celebrities and such on Twitter, which increases the chances that we'll only get their viewpoints and their takes on the news. He says this:
But you know what? That's pretty close to what happens. The person on your Twitter feed who follows CNN will retweet the important, attention-grabbing stories. If all you follow are celebrities, then when you see The Rock or some guy from the Jersey Shore tweeting a 140 character blurb about some major news thing, you're going to hit Google. There was a story in the news recently about just how much news traffic is being generated by stuff shared on Facebook. That same principle applies here.
I'm not trying to offer a serious critique of the Cracked article here. But it provides a useful-jumping off point for repeating something I've said before, regarding publishing: we're the new gatekeepers. Us.
Was there some problem with people finding about Osama's death? No. The whole industrialized western world found out about it, and as individuals a lot of us learned about it faster than we would have if we had to wait until we were within earshot of a television or radio.
And it's not just big stories that get channeled to our ears. It's "little" stories, stuff that's important to us but that the media would not position as a major story. To some extent that contributes to the online echo chamber effect, as we all funnel stories to each other that we know the recipients are likely to be interested in or agree with (or be outraged by), but anybody who's spent more than 15 minutes on a social network knows it's impossible to be completely insulated from opposing viewpoints.
There are a lot of things that can be critiqued in the way we collectively covered and responded to the coverage of Osama bin Laden's death, but the way the information spread through Twitter doesn't begin to "prove we're screwed".
I love Cracked for a lot of reasons, but me being me, one of the reasons I love it is because it's a great indication of how big a game-changer the internet is. When I was growing up, Cracked was an inferior imitation of the venerable Mad Magazine. I loved Mad for being a source of consistently awesome and well-constructed and hilarious puns (also known as the only kind of puns there are) and also for being one of the two sources of information about transsexual/transgenderism that was available to a small-town kid when I was growing up.
(The other major source was TV shows and movies. In both cases, the information was the same: "This concept actually exists, and it is both hilarious and creepy." But you know what? That was better than not knowing it existed. Thinking oneself to be a kind of freak that actually exists out in the world is better than thinking oneself to simply be a freakish anomaly of a freak. This, of course, is another way that the internet is a game-changer.)
Nowadays, of course, Cracked is not an inferior knock-off of anything. They're not the only daily update humor site. I can't point to any one thing they definitively started doing before anyone else. But they do everything they do so well. And their articles have actually enriched my life in a few ways.
But of course, even a... fixed clock... is wrong... once a... okay, this metaphor doesn't work. The point is that everyone gets things wrong sometimes. Cracked as an entity has no viewpoint, it's made up of individual writers and outside submitters. But the one of those individual writers who came up with one of today's offerings, a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the way news spread across the internet in the wake of Osama's death, missed the mark, I believe.
He's talking about how we all follow celebrities and such on Twitter, which increases the chances that we'll only get their viewpoints and their takes on the news. He says this:
When JFK was killed, Walter Cronkite broke into an episode of As the World Turns to tell the nation. Nobody breaks into your Twitter feed to tell you that CNN's Breaking News feed is going to be reporting actual breaking news for the next three days.
But you know what? That's pretty close to what happens. The person on your Twitter feed who follows CNN will retweet the important, attention-grabbing stories. If all you follow are celebrities, then when you see The Rock or some guy from the Jersey Shore tweeting a 140 character blurb about some major news thing, you're going to hit Google. There was a story in the news recently about just how much news traffic is being generated by stuff shared on Facebook. That same principle applies here.
I'm not trying to offer a serious critique of the Cracked article here. But it provides a useful-jumping off point for repeating something I've said before, regarding publishing: we're the new gatekeepers. Us.
Was there some problem with people finding about Osama's death? No. The whole industrialized western world found out about it, and as individuals a lot of us learned about it faster than we would have if we had to wait until we were within earshot of a television or radio.
And it's not just big stories that get channeled to our ears. It's "little" stories, stuff that's important to us but that the media would not position as a major story. To some extent that contributes to the online echo chamber effect, as we all funnel stories to each other that we know the recipients are likely to be interested in or agree with (or be outraged by), but anybody who's spent more than 15 minutes on a social network knows it's impossible to be completely insulated from opposing viewpoints.
There are a lot of things that can be critiqued in the way we collectively covered and responded to the coverage of Osama bin Laden's death, but the way the information spread through Twitter doesn't begin to "prove we're screwed".