Review of Literature: Power Users and Central Hierarchies

Review of Literature: Power Users and Central Hierarchies (cont'd)

Previous analyses of online news websites and aggregators have similar findings, all pointing towards a concentrated newsflow. A 2004 study found that:

While the five largest American newspapers account for 21.5% of circulation among the
top 100 daily newspapers, the top five newspaper websites account for 41.4% of the total links found on the internet to the top 100 newspapers (Hamilton, 2004).
Additionally, a one month study of my own, which looked at Digg’s front page for one month in October 2009, found that of 375 stories recording, 46.1% of the stories came from 38 users, while the remaining 53.9% came from the remaining 161 users (Spong, Braun & Woodruff, 2009). Previous to this, it was found that Digg’s top 100 users submitted 44 percent of the site’s top stories in 2007, and 56% in 2006 (Wilson, 2008).

For the amount of accusations Digg faces for being an oligarchy, an equal amount of criticism comes from those concerned with ‘bury brigades’ – groups of users that unite with their own agenda to try and throw off the gatekeeping process of the site’s top users. One such group, the Digg Patriots, were uncovered in a 2010 study, revealing a network of users dedicated to voting down (burying) stories posted to Digg that had a liberal slant to them – particularly stories praising the Democratic Party (Oleson, 2010). The Inquirer explained the actions of the Digg Patriots:

When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section, where it otherwise would usually reside for about 24 hours, and cannot reach the front page. So by doing this, this one group is blocking the ability of the community as a whole to judge the worth of and interest in these stories on their own merits. In essence, they are censoring content at Digg (Neal, 2010).

Unheard of in traditional media, this ‘inverted gatekeeping’ illustrates the instability that can arise when content ranking is decided by a populace, as opposed to an editor.

There is much potential in further researching the user generation of content on Digg, especially regarding the gatekeeping of said content, and the agenda with which it is posted. With more people abandoning traditional media in favour of personally-catered new media, it was hoped that through this latest study, the strongest results yet may be derived.