I’m reading through the summary of findings of this Pew survey of Facebook users. (It is based on phone polling, so caveat emptor.) The point they are foregrounding in their report is that Facebook has “power users,” which means that the division of labor on Facebook’s social factory is uneven — some active users work harder at building the network and feeding its flows, which makes using the site more engaging for passive users. Thanks to the Facebook freaks (and it seems that everyone is linked to a few of these), the less involved users have something new to see or do when they log in.

Niemann Journalism Lab interprets this as good news for the old media business:

If Facebook activity disproportionately relies on a subset of power users with busy hands, that’s an opening for news outlets or individual journalists to fill that need. The conversation is far more distributed than it was pre-Internet, but it’s still not evenly distributed.

In other words, big media can figure out a way to hire and control the power users, and make them into A&R curatorial types for social media. Or they can try to supplant those people who are already in your networks — make them seem more like kooks with TMI disease while their paid mavens hustle to dispense objective and relevant cultural information.

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