While that’s unsurprising on the one hand, on the other it’s its own kind of WHOA HUGE NEWS finding. Conventional wisdom – and even our everyday experience of the web – might suggest that emotion and overall WHOAness would trump other considerations. This is the operational logic of a site like Buzzfeed, whose brand is driven by little else beyond the WHOA. And Twitter, in particular, has a flattening effect: Our rolling, rollicking sources of news all roll and rollick within the same 140-character-high little boxes. On Twitter, puny little @megangarber gets the same physical real estate as @WSJ, @NYTimes, and@BarackObama. (And if puny little @megangarber posts a lot of tweets, she’d get, actually, morephysical real estate than the established institutions.)
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