Open AccessWHY FACEBOOK IS NOT A GATEWAY TO NEWS CONTENT
Author(s) -
Marie Palmer
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12003
Subject(s) - gateway (web page) , intertextuality , content (measure theory) , intermediary , social media , world wide web , computer science , sociology , media studies , business , art , literature , mathematical analysis , mathematics , marketing
Over the past fifteen years, the emergence of intermediaries hastransformed the circulation of news content. Social media platforms and news aggregatorshave become main gateways to news content. However, they don't circulate news but snippetsof existing news content. This article focuses on why those snippets are identified by usersas news. Drawing on social semiotics, this study uses the concept of genre - as a tacit andconventional system of categorisation of texts or discursive practices (Neale, 1980), whichprovides clues regarding how to interact with a text in a specific cultural situation(Martin, 1984)- to understand the complex nature of the snippet. Using a multimodal analysisof a series of over 150 Facebook news posts, this article argues that the design of Facebookposts uses horizontal and vertical intertextuality, to generate a socially endorsed commenton news. Therefore, Facebook cannot really by defined as a gateway to news content butrather as an intertextual commenter.