#11

Previous to this prompt I have never used any social media sites to share or acquire any sort of news stories, and I don't intend to in the future. Aside from NewsVine, which seems to largely deal with, you know, actual news, other social media sites seem to largely deal with curiosities and amusements. Which is fine, but it's not news.

One thing that these sites seem to trumpet is the interactivity of it all, and the ability to comment and rate things. That's all well and good, but it takes almost no time at all for people to display their pettiness, just their utter smallness when they begin a virtual slugfest over contentious issues. NewsVine is largely news, but most of the "news" appears to be provided by partisan sources (on both sides), which makes it highly editorialized news. A viewpoint is built right into the links to many of the articles on Reddit. People distract themselves from concentrating on actual issues and actual news by either patting each other on the back for agreeing viewpoints or tearing each other apart. It's nonsense, it's a cavalcade of virtual chest-poking, it's a race to get past the news and get down to proving "insightfulness" (or displaying a loose grasp on grammar / the English language). It's the same way when people comment on articles for my hometown's local paper, the Janesville Gazette. Just a lot of people coming up with different ways to say "See, I told you so!" or "You're an idiot!" And I just realized oh my God I AM ACTING LIKE THEM RIGHT NOW NOOOOOOOOOOO.

...

I guess you can always just ignore the comments. And I guess I have difficulty understanding the impulse to try and share news stories / blog posts with nobody and then make comments on these stories and posts to a universe that doesn't know who you are.

Getting onto sort of a tangent, this is the same reason why it's hard to take reviews at Yelp or UrbanSpoon seriously: some of the people on those sites hate everything (or love everything). There is no requirement to actually be critical and fully explain your ratings, and that's not useful to me.

I would be extremely hesitant to utilize any of these sites in a library setting. I suppose you could set it up so that patrons could vote posts from your library blog up on various sites, but what good does that do you outside of your immediate user group? It would be foolish to recommend any of these sites as a decent place to get news. Even CNN.com is hardly any better than many of these sites.

Personally, I stick to BBC News and NPR for actual news because it seems to be provided with the least inflection. It can be dry and dull for sure but it's much easier to digest.