The Metric Mindset: Social Life in Datafied Media Landscapes 107 Journalists often refer to the news value of the stories they tell, which includes, besides relevance and public interest, also the importance of a news item in terms of how ‘fresh’ it is. This doxa also feeds into the discourse around news and becomes a social convention that you also risk losing face over if you do not recognise, for example by sharing an old news story on your feed and revealing that you did not know that it was in fact several weeks old. If you have done that you run the risk of being consid- ered ‘out of time’ and non-informed about the recent happenings of the day around the world (whichever that is). News value in terms of ‘relevance’ or ‘public interest’ also reveal among media users as amounts of engagement with a post in the news feed. And if the amount of engagement cannot be determined by a user, he or she also gets disoriented, as in this combined quote from two informants: It’s interesting to see what the majority thinks be- cause then I can see if it’s worth my time to look a Yo t… u want to know how popular the page is before giving it a like. As can be seen from these quotes, metrics represent popularity, and the two quotes illustrate two different approach- es to that. The first quote indicates a kind of temporal econom- ics, whereby the informant uses metrics as indicators of worthwhileness (cf. SCHRØDER, 2015). The second quote expresses something similar, but also slightly different since it points to the popularity of the post in quantitative terms. If the first example points to the value for the user, a sort of orientation in a media landscape of textual overabundance, the second point to the social dimension of fitting in with the larger social collective, to confirm the commonality with other fellow social media users. This is an outward-oriented act, whereas the first quote represents an inward, value-oriented approach. In a way, the second quote also expresses an approach that can work suppressive, the anxiety of being alone with one’s value judgment that can be seen as similar to a ‘spiral of silence’ where the suspicion of being alone in liking the post prevents
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