Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters

by Alfred Hermida

Social media is fuelling our human urge to share, affecting the information we depend on to make smart decisions, from choosing politicians to doing business to raising money for charity. Tell Everyone delves into contemporary culture to reveal how social media has become the planet's nervous system—amplifying the power of individuals, informing our choices and shaping how we learn about our world.

Writing with journalistic flair but with academic rigour, online news pioneer and social media maven Alfred Hermida lays bare why we feel compelled to share news, gossip and information, and always have. Every day more than 500 million messages are sent on Twitter, 800 million people share four billion stories, links, photographs and videos on Facebook. Every minute, 100 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. And the flow is ever-increasing. In this new era of media saturation, what do we mean by “the news”? Is “the most trusted name in news” today a veteran anchor on television or an undergraduate tweeting from Tahrir Square in Cairo?

Tell Everyone spells out how our ability to create and share news is shaping the information we receive and depend on to make informed decisions, from choosing politicians to doing business. Drawing on historical examples, real-world experiences and leading research, Tell Everyone explains how the power of sharing is transforming how we understand and give meaning to world events.

• ISBN10: 0385679564
• ISBN13: 9780385679565
• Publish Date: 14 October 2014
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Imprint: Doubleday Canada
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 272
• Language: English

Reviews

[Lianne]

I won an ARC of this book via the GoodReads First Reads programme. This review in its entirety was originally posted at caffeinatedlife.net: http://www.caffeinatedlife.net/blog/2014/10/14/review-tell-everyone-why-we-share-why-it-matters/

Tell Everyone is a timely book because it looks at the ways in which social media is connecting us socially, politically, compared to what came before. It’s a bit of a mish-mash of the personal and the public, of how it circumvents or opens avenues of communication and the delivery of news that are outside of the traditional routes of journalism. So it seems a bit of a mix, but that’s what social media is, blurring the lines between the private and the public, and engaging us in ways that are different.

Much of the book is focused on journalism because social media has made such an impact on the field. Often times the breaking news is coming from Twitter or Facebook because it’s so immediately accessible to people on the ground, but at the same time the questions of accuracy, relevance, and the way the news is perceived, received, and presented are raised.

Weaving in and out of the book is also the way in which we socialise and conduct ourselves. Although the first three chapters focuses a lot on the topic and the ways in which we project ourselves and our thoughts, whether it be through Twitter or Facebook, and how we socialise and collectivise online.

Overall, Tell Everyone is a very informative book in trying to make sense of social media and how it’s become such a norm in our society. Like social media, the book does zip through very quickly, dropping events and examples and info here and there and then moving along to the next topic, which is a bummer if you wanted to learn more about one particular aspect of social media. Nonetheless, it’s a good introduction into thinking more about the way we socialise–whether it’s via Facebook or Twitter, Reddit or YouTube–and well worth checking out.