Madrigal argues against the dominant theory, which espouses a mid-2000 paradigm shift from mostly static, unconnected webpages to a drastically more social Web 2.0 due to webcrawlers and sites like Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia.
I'm not particularly interested in parsing through competing historical narratives, but I was quite taken by his point that, "the sharing you see on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the tip of the 'social' iceberg. We are impressed by its scale because it's easy to measure."
Data on web traffic show that most social traffic is what Madrigal calls "Dark Social":
It shows up variously in programs as "direct" or "typed/bookmarked" traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you.
The web analytics firm Chartbeat has found a way to quantify this "dark social" (they call it "direct social") data, and it turns out that for media sites, around 69% of social referrals were "dark," followed by Facebook (20%) and Twitter (6%).
So, most sharing of articles online is done in a way that is difficult to measure.
In addition to his conclusions about reevaluating what the true tradeoffs are of our decision to engage with social networking sites (or not), this article expanded my thinking on the concept of the "public self" and how that may impact SNA accuracy. There is a reason people are sharing information privately, or semi-privately, with more frequency than they are Tweeting or posting articles to Facebook.
This is worth bearing in mind when attempting to conduct an analysis using social media data.
1 comment:
Utterly fascinating. I realized that some inlinks were untraceable, but I would never have guessed that it's more than 50%. Worth reading, as the deeper implications of being "invisible" are not at all clear.
Post a Comment