25 Things Isn’t News, But It Isn’t Surprising [St00p1d N3wB5]

Adam Singer, just like the rest of us, can’t resist falling into our old habits of joining in on the echo chamber.

He’s, essentially, flabbergasted.

Flabbergasted that newbies are being newbies. He’s talking about the Internet newbs at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

They both wrote up stories about the 25 things meme that’s going around on Friendfeed and Facebook. If you’re somehow unaware of what I’m talking about, it’s a meme where you and your friends are encouraged to make a post detailing 25 random facts about yourself that might not otherwise be common knowledge (I fell prey to this meme here).

Here’s what Adam says:

Hate to be the one to say this, but the 25 things meme is not news.  It is simply what the social web does.  If national media (yes, national media - NYT, USA Today, even TIME) are going to write up note-tagging on Facebook and that is the best web culture reporting they can come up with - that’s just sad.

[…]

Really?  This is so mysterious?  Wow, I could have sworn people have been doing this since we could email each other.

I may be in the minority, but do you find this mundane coverage by national outlets trying to report on the absolute least interesting things in the social web uncomfortable to read?

He talks about it as if this is something unpredictable – this ‘news’ coverage of what we who’ve been on the Internet for 15 years have seen for a long time.

But as the social web goes truly mainstream, people are going to be exposed to this stuff for the first time. And some of these folks in the mainstream are going to be journalists for mainstream publications.  And as NBC used to say about their re-runs, “if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!”

How are these newbs getting stuck on the Internet beat, anyway?  Well, it’s a matter of perspective and complexity.  Most of the Internet is about social interaction these days – and as anyone who’s ever taken a sociology course can tell you, this stuff ain’t rocket science.

It doesn’t take much of an intellectual to be an “expert” in social media, particularly when you have such well known experts like Robert Scoble, Seth Godin and Chris Brogan paving the way with all you need to know in layman’s terms. To analyze the stuff takes an astute mind, but it doesn’t take an experienced one.

Thus these newbs are given a beat at a mainstream publication, these journals of record, to talk about what’s going on here like it’s sliced bread.

And the rest of us get to laugh at them.