“Refrigerator journalism” – those bits of a newspaper that you’d cut and stick to your fridge. Clippings that have a personal relevance and accumulate to do lists, photos and post-it notes around them.
But can social networks like Facebook replace this idea? Writes Jason Fry:
By taking the fuss and friction out of sharing and making it real-time, Facebook is in many ways a better refrigerator. As such, it’s enormously valuable in reinforcing real-world community, particularly now that it’s becoming fairly representative of more and more real-world communities. On Facebook, strong ties are naturally and easily reinforced, and weaker ties can be strengthened by posting photos and sharing articles and commenting and liking and just reading status updates.
News organisations can make use of Facebook by seeing it as complementary to what they do and a way for their content to be shared with a wider audience.
But will this sharing is valuable, it’s lacking something, says Fry (who goes on to offer his suggestions of a solution to this):
The things we share on Facebook are soon swept away by newer things and lost from view. They’re part of a rich stream of shared experience, but with the exception of photo albums, most of that shared experience is carried off into the realm of ‘older posts’ and effectively lost.