A Tweet I recently posted about a study that found most Tweets are ignored was clicked through eight times – which seems to demonstrate either that my “followers” are interested in their own ambivalence toward the medium or that there is something else is going on.
Many in my demographic are skeptical of social media – there is a sense (to take Shakespeare way out of context) that there is much sound and fury signifying nothing. But to dismiss the effects of the medium as minimal seems a bit too easy.
The primary problem with the study as reported is that it measures whether or not a Tweet has been paid attention to by the number of times it is re-Tweeted or responded to. It does not measure how many times a link embedded in the Tweet is clicked to (now nine in my case, though in fairness the ninth was when I opened the article to write this) and more importantly it doesn’t measure how people absorb or process the Tweets they skim but don’t do anything with.
It may be that the effects of Twitter, Facebook and other social media are akin to the effects of other media. There could, for example, be a “two-step” flow of communication (see for example Paul Lazerfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet’s 1948 book The People’s Choice and Elihu Katz’s 1957 extension on the theory in Public Opinion Quarterly). The two-step flow suggests “ideas often flow from radio and print to opinion leaders and from these to the less active sections of the population.” It could be that frequent Facebook posters and Twitterers of news serve as online elites, directing the attention of the rest of us; as we scroll through funny pictures of cats and updates about the cleanliness of restaurant restrooms we also see posts of news stories and analysis of world events, which tells us which events to which to pay attention.
One could also argue there are agenda setting, framing and priming effects of social media. Twitter and Facebook don’t tell us what to think, but rather what to think about. Further they tell us how to think about it and how to evaluate other events in light of the information (the literature on this seems almost infinite – good starts are Maxwell McCombs’ and Donald Shaw’s 1972 Public Opinion Quarterly article “The Agenda Setting Role of Mass Communication” and Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder’s 1987 book News That Matters). These effects are more difficult to measure outside of an experimental setting, but that doesn’t mean the effects aren’t there.
Other possible effects of social media include cultivation, socialization, post-modern, and good old fashioned Marxism (information as commodity).
Like most people I think that there must be some effect to social media – I’m on it, I consume it, and there seems to be a lot of it – but as with most media effects it’s not clear what that effect is.
