Friends, Followers and the Future
How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media
- 286 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Friends, Followers and the Future
How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media
About this book
There's a revolution going on, as ever-accelerating developments in digital information technologies change nearly every aspect of how we live, work, play, do business and engage in politics. Share and share alike—the numbers say it all as billions of people worldwide flock to online media and use social networks to discover and spread news and information.
In the process, ever-growing networks of "ordinary people" are using these powerful new tools to trim the influence long held by Big Business, Big Government and Big Media. No longer just passive recipients, participants in social networks now regularly make and break news while organizing civic and political actions that bypass censors, outpace traditional media, attract massive audiences and influence the rise and fall of brands, industries, politicians and even governments.
In this insider's look at how social media are transforming our world, Rory O'Connor explains the trends and explores what tech visionaries, media makers, political advisers and businesspeople are saying about the meteoric rise of the various social networks of friends and followers, and what they bode for our future.
"Rory O'Connor is one of the smartest media guys around. He knows who's spinning, who's pandering, and who's putting money in his own pocket at the expense of logic, reason, and the public good."—Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair media critic
"This is a timely book about a vital subject: How do we get information and is it reliable? With a 'cold eye, ' author Rory O'Connor shows how traditional journalism cheapened its value by sabotaging its trust, and how the digital revolution wonderfully democratizes information yet often removes the journalistic curator, creating more noise, more ME and less WE news. If you want to understand the future of news, its opportunities and its pitfalls, read this book."—Ken Auletta, author and New Yorker media writer
Rory O'Connor, co-founder of MediaChannel.org, is the author of Shock Jocks: Hate Speech & Talk Radio. He has won two Emmys and a George Orwell Award, among many other honors.
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Table of contents
- Introduction: Word of Mouse
- The Rise of Social Media
- Brands, Cesspools, and Credibility
- Can Brands Be Trusted?
- The Facebook Decade: F8 = Fate?
- The Death of Privacy
- The YouTube Effect: 48 Hours Every Minute
- Twitter: News No Longer Breaks, It Tweets
- Google Loses Its Buzz
- The New Breed of Media Researchers
- Public Displays of Connection
- Politics 2.0
- The Daily Me vs. The Daily We
- The State of the Media & the Death of Brands
- Politics 3.0
- Going Forward: The Feed Is Your Friend
- Index
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author