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Journalists Get Locked in Farmhouse With Only Access to Facebook, Twitter

by Caleb Johnson on January 22, 2010 at 03:25 PM


We've all heard stories about how social networking sites are the newest and most reliable way to break news. But just how true is this claim? That's the question that a group of five European journalists hope to answer. According to AFP, these journalists will lock themselves in a French farmhouse for five days, beginning February 1st, and limit their communications with the outside world to Facebook and Twitter. The goal of this experiment is to determine how accurately and how quickly the social networking sites deliver news to users. To ensure they don't cheat, the journalists will surrender their smartphones for regular "dumb" phones, and will be given computers with blank hard drives. It'll be up to tweets, Wall posts, status updates, and retweets to keep these journalists aware of happenings in the outside world.

We don't need to lock ourselves in a farmhouse to figure out how this experiment will end. Twitter broke a lot of news on the earthquake in Haiti, so, if the journalists follow credible accounts like The New York Times or Huffington Post, it's quite possible they'll stay adequately connected. But it's also possible that they'll simply spend those five days playing flash games, reading lists, and watching cat videos. Because, really, what else is social networking good for? [From: AFP/Yahoo News]

Tags: experiment, facebook, journalist, news, real world, RealWorld, socialnetworking, top, twitter, web

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