All Your Friends Like This: How Social Networks Took Over News

All Your Friends Like This is all about the great media power shift from traditional media to readers: what we ‘share’ drives and creates the news.

How do you get your news? Chances are, if you’re anything like the rest the us, you don’t get it from a newspaper or the television - that’s so old school. Instead, you get your media fix, breaking news and indepth features from Facebook or Twitter.

The great power shift from traditional media to readers is happening right now. What we ‘share’ among ourselves drives and creates the news, and that reality is changing the whole media landscape. Sharing on social networks has become the way in which news stories are disseminated, and the boom in social networks means that for millions of people their first exposure to information about the world comes from their friends, not from the news media. Our social networks influence the content that we distribute - we like to share stories that make us look ‘cool’ or ‘intelligent’ or ‘ahead of the game’. The stories change and with them the tone and flavour of the news-making process is irrevocably altered.

But what does this mean for journalism? For the news? Are we better off or worse off because of it?

Highly topical, provocative and totally absorbing, All Your Friends Like This does for the media what Freakonomics did for economics. If you’re interested in the news, in what we read and why we read it, and the future of the media, then this is the game-changing book that you’ll have to read.