While reading The Tipping Point last week, I found one study particularly interesting. The study revolved around suicide trends and how the suicide headlines in prominent newspapers actually influenced the suicide rate.
This got me thinking about how new media - the blogs, websites, and news aggregators that are leading to the slow demise of print newspapers – would be responsible for future trends such as these. Does new media understand the power it has been given? Is the influence on social progress falling into a larger, more diverse group of less controllable ramblings? Or will the wisdom of the crowd prevail and improve the influence on society?
Or, rather, will the reader take more control? Is the power out of the publishers hands now? As the number of publishers spread, can the reader instead define what they want to read as opposed to the overbearing propaganda from the only newspaper in town?
Copycats
First, the study from The Tipping Point. David Phillips at UCSD, the sociologist responsible for the study, is a “pioneer in this field.” He conducted the studies on suicides and their relation to newspaper headlines.
“He began by making a list of all the stories about suicide that ran on the front page of the country’s most prominent newspapers in the twenty year stretch between the end of the 1940′s and the end of the 1960′s. Then he matched them up with the suicide statistics from the same period…Immediately after the stories about suicides appeared, suicides in the area served by the newspaper jumped. In the case of national stories, the rate jumped nationally…Then Phillips repeated his experiment with traffic accidents…He found the same pattern.
On the day after a highly publicized suicide, the number of fatalities from traffic accidents was, on average, 5.9 percent higher than expected. Two days afer a suicide story, they rose 4.1 percent. Thre days after, they rose 3.1 percent, and four days after, they rose 8.1 percent. (After ten days, the traffic fatality rate was back to normal.) Phillips concluded that one of the ways people commit suicide is by deliberately crashing their cars, and that these people were just as susceptible to the contagious effects of a highly publicized suicide as were people killing themselves by more conventional means.”
Gladwell goes on to explain how accurate these studies are in that the results can actually get quite specific.
“In his study of motor fatalities, Phillips found a clear pattern. Stories about suicides resulted in an increase in single car crashes where the victim was the driver. Stories about suicide murders resulted in an increase in multiple car crashes in which the victims included both drivers and passengers. Stories about young people committing suicide resulted in more traffic fatalities involving young people.”
Gladwell’s point is to show how the influence of famous or powerful people (some of them made famous merely by being on the front page of the paper) can have such a powerful influence over others. He places them in his group of “Salesmen” – those with influence over others.
Medium of Influence
However, my point is to look at this study from the point of view of the “medium of influence” and not the “person of influence“. Major newspapers had a lot to do with this study. They had both national influence and local influence. It was the natural logical source to reference for this study. I have not done the studies, but I wouldn’t doubt that these statistics transfer over into many other areas of social influence. Be it drunk driving, murder, attending a baseball game, doing charity work, or picking stocks; major headlines of newspapers have had an enormous impact on the way we live(d).
Today, however, we are seeing the circulation and influence of these newspapers dwindle. We do not know how much influence they will lose, only that they are quickly being replaced by other sources of media. As these new sources take over, people are beginning to use them in different ways and thus the method of influence changes.
There is the definite risk that during this transition readers rely too much on the “new media” as a reliable source of news. We have seen this already with blogs reporting inaccurate information or rumors and people believing everything they read online.
The Reader’s Choice
However, I think after a long enough period of accustomization to this new media, people will realize they can find and choose the news they wish to read and believe in. The value gained through the diversity of publishers these days is an opportunity for readers, not a hindrance. People will learn to use new media in a customized manner that suits their tastes. Thus, people have the choice of their publishing influence.
I also think that new methods of accreditation will come about for online media. Perhaps in time an overarching blogging association will take power and set forth a more thorough set of rules for reporting media that people come to trust. We already have security badges all over our sites and browsers proving the safety of our websites. How long before we have those same badges for newsworthiness?
Either way, the influence of new media is an important social issue that must be taken into account as we enter the next stage in publishing evolution. As we have seen, these are real lives that we are playing with.
*image source: worldofstock.com, wordpress.com
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