http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/zuckerberg-realises-the-dangers-of-the-socialmedia-revolution-he-helped-start-20170505-gvz28p.html

This week’s blog is based around an article from the New York Times that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend. In a week where Herald journalists were on strike, I was reflecting on the importance of media and wondering whether a tradition I have always enjoyed on a Saturday – reading the newspapers, going to disappoint this week. When I came across “Zuckerberg realises the dangers of the social-media revolution he helped to start” my interest peaked. Many in education have managed the revolution amongst young people in social media that Facebook began thirteen years ago, or have been the recipients of 100s of printed pages of inappropriate Facebook posts after a night where teens ‘lost the plot’ and asked to intervene. The personal and social impacts of various social media forms are well documented.

Could Mark Zuckerberg be having second thoughts? Well… any second thoughts are not about the challenges social media brings to adolescent wellbeing and mental health. Zuckerberg can see however a new development that is concerning – the filtering of what we see and the media we consume that narrows intellectual development and individual thought.

The use of social media in the American election has been the subject of a study for a team of researchers at MIT. They have looked at how 1.25 million stories during the campaign were shared. Obama commented that we live in “an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television.” The role of News Feed and its role as a source of information – the “filter bubble” is controlling type of information we receive. Have a look at the good explanation in this article.  Even Zuckerberg acknowledges that this “may fragment our shared sense of reality.”

In a week where the importance of journalists to uncover truths and bring us stories is being challenged – a wider revolution is silently and effectively controlling the way in which we think. As adults, we have ways of managing this – we owe it to the next generation to help them be critical consumers of the news they receive.