Facebook & Journalism
Simon Garfield’s interview in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine with facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is a classic example of bad journalism about facebook. Here’s what you’ll learn if you give a few moments of your life to reading Garfield’s 3700 word article:
- Mark Zuckerberg likes wearing a black north face fleece.
- Mark Zuckerberg is extremely wealthy.
- Facebook is very popular
- Mark Zuckerberg is: “shy in the way that short, ginger-haired people often are.”
- “No one so young has ever held the key to so much personal information; the sheer scale makes the data lost recently on MoD and NHS discs look like dropped homework”
And that’s pretty much it. I’m not suggesting Garfield should have penned a piece of pro-facebook propaganda, but approx 12.5 million people in the UK use facebook and there are more than 120 million users worldwide. Surely this is interesting? What does this mean for communication, relationships, community and the way we live? What about the way campaigning organisations are using facebook or the political usage of facebook? What about Mark Zuckerberg and the other key players in the facebook world? Sadly Simon Garfield ignores all of these interesting issues and instead writes an article that tells us very little and comes across as slightly snide and unnecessarily rude about Zuckerberg, at one point suggesting that a friendless childhood may explain why he created facebook. Oh and comparing the information held on facebook to that held by the Ministry of Defence and the Dept of Health is one of the most ludicrious things I have read in a long time.
I’ve yet to read a decent article about facebook – it seems that youth, money and large amounts of data dazzle journalists and the result is predictable and disappointing.
For the record this post has nothing to do with my affection for a certain black north face fleece that cuddles my upper body as I write this!
I didn’t see the piece but I’ll put in a good word for Simon Garfield. I think his strength is in telling stories through others’ words. In particular I have in mind his book The Nation’s Favourite, which charts the period in the early 90s when Radio 1 was shedding its Smashey & Nicey types to much public controversy and plummeting ratings. Almost all of this is told in long monologues from the DJs involved, the best of which naturally come from the late John Peel:
Garfield also wrote a couple of wartime books comprising extracts from the diaries kept by people for the national archive (the one that inspired Victoria Wood’s film Housewife, 49) – less successful than the Radio 1 book but a mammoth achievement in condensing material to its essence.
Thanks John – that is a very funny extract. I must check it out. Although it only makes his zuckerberg failings worse!