Image courtesy of losangelestheatres.googlepages.com

During the first half of the last century newsreel cinemas dominated Europe, America and the Commonwealth. Pathé Frères’s 1908 invention really came into its own during the world wars, creating ‘watercooler’ spaces to collectively experience and digest that news.

Such was their draw, that in 1909, a newsreel-only cinema, the Daily Bioscope, opened in London. Many followed across the world over the next few decades.

Consider that for a moment. Even newspapers at their circulation peak in the 1950s contained light relief, and now the ratio of feature and fluff to hard news must be a fairly even split when you average tabloids and broadsheets.

But in 1909, the lure of the newsreel was enough to pull millions through the doors. But was it just the content?

Well no, of course not.

People are news. People consume news. People analyse news and relate it to their people.

News is social. News always was social. And it’s certainly social now.

And now for Twitter.

The idea of Twitter being a social news aggregator probably sounds absurd to those still dismayed by its invention, yet to use it. Or at least fairly pretentious. But that’s what it is.

And whether your bag is celebrity news, international development, culture-oriented or regional happenings, Twitter can perform a filtering, aggregating function – if you tell it to. The difference is, to the offline world, it’s the celebrity updates that have stolen most of the (snarky) attention.

We consume socially. We eat together, drink together, shop together and watch TV together, raking over it together. News is no different, only since the newsreels, and before the advent of reader comments, it wasn’t so easy to see that social ‘chewing over’ taking place.

What’s next for social consumption of news? Unfortunately the way we discuss and debate the news, has stolen the show. We turn our avatars green, set our locations to Tehran and think we ARE the news. We’re not. The giddy earnestness of zealots has obscured the more tame reality that we like to engage in discussion, we like to share ideas and try and change minds, that doesn’t mean we can change the world with our slippers on.

I hope that 2010 sees us socialising the news experience more, reading beyond the retweeted headlines and tapping into the rich vein of new ideas (and publications previously unheard of) that we are privy to through the people we ‘follow’ and they follow and they follow and they follow and they…

What’s next for social consumption and creation of news? For what it’s worth, I believe social news will be brought down to a granular level and that’s where it operates most effectively.

We’re not going to oust a tyrant with a Twibbon, but we may be able to sway local politicians if we are able to get a direct, public conversation with them.

We may be able to rally troops to try to fight a post office closure.

Or, on a purely useful level, we may be able to provide the most up-to-date local news about road and school closures, train delays and icy spots by looking out of our window at the same time and pressing send. And actually, I think that’s pretty exciting.