Reviews
On Its Release Date, "New" Social Media Book Is Already Outdated
The subtitle of Friends, Followers and the Future ($15.95, City Lights Publishers), a book coming out today by Emmy-winning journalist Rory O’Connor, has a dark ring to it. “How Social Media are Changing Politics, Threatening Big Brands, and Killing Traditional Media” conjures up images of everything changing, and not necessarily for the good.
But the book itself seems split on whether social media - and the challenges it presents to our old-line institutions - are good or evil. All at once, O’Connor seems amazed by YouTube, okay with the speed over accuracy rule of news distribution on Twitter and concerned with the typical laundry list of privacy violations committed by Facebook, Google and other big, digital media players.
