Of the eight characteristics that Ryan Thornburg identifies in his book, "Producing Online News Digital Skills, Stronger Stories," the most relevant ones to this article are magnitude, conflict and novelty. Google, commonly referred to as a "web giant" is a site visited by millions of people across the globe on a daily basis, therefore the demographic affected by the integration of Google+ with the search engine function is large. Novelty and conflict are interrelated in this story. Social media networking is still its primitive stages of development, it is an "unusual subject" as Thornburg describes it in his book. The novelty of the subject matter, inevitably creates areas of dispute and as social media continues to unfold, ... More »

Technology has become so immersed in our society that the founders and representatives of these social networking sites (such as Google+) do not see a difference between posting "statues" on these sites and using these posts and information for worldwide searches. It is an interesting debate because on one hand, the internet is a public sphere which has the entire world as an audience, but, on the other, using information from one site and publishing it on another is a bit extreme. However, in the debate between Facebook and Google about Google using its Google+ contact information rather than other websites, Google+ is associated with Google and therefore is the property of Google. If Facebook wants their searches to be placed ... More »