SMADD (Social Media Attention Deficit Disorder)

It isn't often that I go on a rant, so I hope you'll pardon this interruption from your daily supply of law-related blogs. I struggled with the title for this post; I thought of A Good Headline is More Important than the Truth, or The Internet Makes Us Lazy, but in the end they sounded a little too inflammatory. But these headlines definitely describe my thinking on how people are beginning to use social media these days. Over the past few months I've seen how social media tools - blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and the like - make it incredibly easy to publicize yourself, report the news, and become an authoritative voice in any of several online communities. But our attention seems to be wandering, and I wonder whether this attention deficit will lead to problems down the road. Two examples to make my point.

Those of you familiar with the podcast I record with Dennis Kennedy may recall an episode we recorded a few weeks ago, entitled The State of the Blawgosphere. In it, I discussed the results of my rather neurotic research project I've been conducting over the past 6-7 years: my cataloging of more than 2,300 law-related blogs on the Internet. I was surprised by the basic results of my research - that just over 48% of those law blogs are still active. I was also shocked to learn that of those blogs that don't survive, the average life span is around one year and ten months.

A couple of weeks later, I read a post on another law blog, where the blogger stated that as a result of his "tiny little, unscientific survey" (he looked at 7 law blogs in total), he came to the conclusion that "Legal Blogs are like small businesses: half of 'em fail in the first year, and 90 percent of 'em fail in the next five." When I read that, I left a comment below his blog post explaining my stats, and why his conclusion was incorrect. However, his post had one sentence in it that would prove irresistible to other bloggers, Twitterers, and even journalists. By saying "Legal blogs don't last,", the blogger ensured his post would spread across the Internet.

And spread it did. Bloggers picked it up, and soon it was being tweeted and re-tweeted on Twitter. Last night the ABA Journal reported these "findings" as news, and TechnoLawyer called it Blawgworld's "Post of the Week." Apparently, nobody took the time to read the comments below the post. Actually, I rarely read comments myself, and I turned them off on this blog a long time ago because the spam problem had gotten so bad. Even so, if you're going to report the news, doesn't it behoove you to know the whole story? Maybe it's true that the whole story isn't quite as interesting as only a very small part.

Second example: a couple of months ago, a person I follow on Twitter posted the following (edited): "RT @_____ Big Law Firm lays off 134 lawyers," with a link to the story. I immediately clicked on that link, thinking this was a huge story. What the story actually said was that 20 lawyers had been laid off in a big firm's 134-lawyer satellite office. When I pointed this out to the person who Re-Tweeted the article, her response was simply, "oops!"

Now, this kind of mistake won't lead to any lawsuits or shouts of "libel!" from the law firm in question, as the article immediately corrected by mistaken impression. But it illustrates something I'll wager happens hundreds (or thousands) of times every day on sites like Twitter: a person sees a juicy headline, and clicks "Re-Tweet" (republishing that headline, for those of you who don't speak Twitter) without even bothering to figure out whether the headline is factually accurate. I see it all the time, and completely understand the urge - the more you tweet, the more people respect you as an authority and begin to follow you on Twitter. But, Twitter or not, if it's a defamatory statement that's being tweeted, anyone who republishes that statement may also be liable for libel.

To me, these two examples demonstrate one of the downsides of social media: that while "click to publish" technology makes it amazingly simple for anyone to have a voice on the Internet, its very simplicity almost encourages publishers to post content without paying attention to what's actually being said. Do I have the answers? Not any good ones - this is still an evolving area. I guess my best advice is: Pay Attention! By following only a part of the online conversation you may be missing out on the bigger picture.

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