New Idea for a Research Topic

They come to me periodically, often in church or the shower (please, no side comments). Odd how this becomes a double play, but the first idea was this: surely we didn't suddenly become more trustful of our friends than the media just because social networking exists today.

Not sure how I wandered off on this, but I'm thinking about a reasonably well-quoted Annenburg School study that internet users had more trust (in the 80s%) in social connections and the interent than the legacy forms of media (all in the 60s for radio, TV and newspaper).

That little snapshot in 2007 got a lot of people -- myself included -- concentrating on social media. Lecturing to Steve Ditmore's sports management class on Tuesday allowed me to ask the question again. Granted, this was a Thanksgiving week crippled class filled with athletes and others who had no choice but to still be in Fayetteville. When asked the question about who they believed more, their friends (and really, with this crowd, their teammates) or the media about news, the answer was predictable. The reason was typical: they each had or knew of an incident of media inaccuracy.

Here's the research angle -- can that doubt in traditional legacy media today versus social media be found in the data of past surveys on the belief in the mass media? When people only talked among themselves at the coffee shop, barber's chair or beauty salon, did they have the same doubts in what they got from the media -- or was it truly a simpler time in the Age of Cronkite and we simply believed what the Big Three said?

Honestly, I don't have that clear a childhood memory of what my parents and grandparents thought of the media to gauge it, but surely we didn't get this cynical toward mass journalism in just the past five to 10 years?