I surveyed 203 students, across all class years and majors. The primary characteristic I’m using to group respondents is their perceived level of news consumption, and we have a fairly logical spread to pull from: 38% of students are low news consumers, 50% are moderate news consumers, and 13% are high news consumers. Part of me expected more students in a collegiate environment to consider themselves high news consumers, especially with the huge numbers of political science and economics majors at Wellesley, but enough people fall into the moderate category to make up for it.

Continuing forwards, highlighting interesting initial summaries: 92% of students consume news online, through newspaper websites, blogs. etc. A respectable 58% read print sources, 54% watch television news, and 52% consume news through their social networks. 79% receive news through word of mouth. When I asked for a primary method of news consumption, however, 65% of students cited online sources and blogs, which is huge. 16% fell to word of mouth, and only 3% responded with print sources. We already knew this (or thought we knew this) but the data wholly supports our assumption that news consumption has moved online.

Another interesting response comes from a question about people’s thoughts while reading the news – I offered the following options:

– How the story affects you personally
- How the story relates to your work
- How the story affects the world at large
- Recent conversations with peers on the subject
- How you could integrate the story into conversation
- Whether the story is in agreement with your previously held opinions
- Who else might be interested in the story

Respondents could pick more than one response, of course, but one response clearly won out above the others: how the story affects the world at large (84%). I’m pretty proud (and a little surprised) that that won out; perhaps our generation is a little less self-obsessed than everyone seems to believe. Other big hitters included personal effect (59%), recent conversations (53%), agreement with the story (54%), and who to share the news with (47%). Considering that those all point to news consumption facilitating a greater conversation with peers, it’s another pretty exciting response.

A final response that I find exciting, and perhaps my favorite: more than half of respondents believe that news “comes to them” (53%), as opposed to their having to search it out (47%). The distinction between 53 and 47 percent isn’t huge, but it’s pretty apparent that five or ten years ago, very few people would have agreed that news “comes to them.” It’s online social networking at work!

There is a lot more data, especially from a long series of situational questions about where students heard a specific story and whether they verified, shared, or explored the story further, but the analysis has yet to be done.

Rheingold writes about his observation of the growth of “texting” as a new means of communication; he notes that everyone seems to be looking at their phones instead of talking into them. The conclusion is made that the growth of mobile Internet will increase the importance of our mobile phones, bringing every piece of information we might need into our palms. Ironically, I took a break from reading the piece to pick up a call and to check my Facebook, both on my iPhone.

This current vision of iPhones and Android-powered devices was a legitimate hypothesis for the future 10 years ago. What’s so funny to me is that our current legitimate hypotheses for the future are comprised of what used to be true scifi and fantasty- appliances that talk to each other and surfaces embedded with giant glass computer screens, everything communicating wirelessly. All that seems to be missing is flying cars, but since it’s become obvious that the car industry is lagging a bit these days, I’m not surprised. Seriously, the future we’re moving into is a legitimate version of Minority Report meets The Fifth Element meets The Jetsons.

At any rate, I was inspired by Rheingold’s introduction; it conjured up visions of my cell phone morphing into an epic remote control with the immense power to deliver me every miniscule piece of information about everything (and everyone) on the planet. His discussion of the pros and cons of this social networking is powerful, and we have already seen the manifestations of much of it (consider Iran this summer).

I just wish he had published something more recently; I’m off now to watch his TED talk, but it’s from 2005. I’m also following him on Twitter, but it’s not yielding much. I’m more interested in what he has to say ABOUT twitter than what he’s saying on twitter, if that makes sense. No upset here, though; I respect Social Mobs enough to leave it at that and walk away pleased.

… and what does this have to do with journalism, you ask? It has everything to do with journalism, because journalism is the democratic act of bringing information from citizens to other citizens. And that is exactly what the social mobs revolution is doing.