Alfred Hermina, Axel Bruns and – more recently – Logan Molynuex use to write about ambient journalism and the question of branding through social media platforms.
Together with mobile devices they are more used than ever for people to access the news. However, as phones grow to become an overwhelming majority of traffic, content has become increasingly aimed at playing the numbers game.
The mobile phone, it turns out, is the greatest homogenising force the media has ever seen. In terms of design: with every pixel precious, sites converged pretty quickly to the format we all now know so well – large photos, clean single-column text on a plain white background, a sticky element at the top of the screen that allegedly allows users to navigate the site but which in practice is mostly just used for branding and/or advertising.
So, in a time when we have access to unlimited information, are we getting more from less or less from more?
So while all news sites claim to be special in some way that probably makes perfect sense to their own journalists, they’re increasingly interchangeable to readers. You click a link on Facebook, and you read a story, and then an hour later you try to remember where you read it: was it the Independent? the Telegraph? the Daily Mail? the Daily Beast? Business Insider? Huffington Post? USA Today? The list is endless, and your chances of getting the answer right, at least if you don’t live in a media bubble, are minimal. Those of us who live in the bubble become obsessed with the narcissism of small differences, and can see differences between them; nobody else care.
Source: The Guardian
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