Are we there yet?

The most important question evolving from this week’s topic comes from straight from a page in Shirky’s book: “if we’re so good at social life and shared effort, what advantages are the tools creating?” (p. 20). The tools he is referring to are a variety of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook, smart phones, and email. So what are the advantages? The readings identify several advantages for corporations; mainly that social networking reduces transaction costs by using “crowdsourcing” to reduce overhead costs and allowing corporations to operate under the Coasean Floor.

Crowdsourcing is the idea that you can use social networking tools to appeal to large groups in order to get around institutional barriers and get services (i.e. – Colgate found someone to solve their fluoride injection problem) or content (i.e. the lady working for the museum found the photos she was looking) at rates drastically lower than you would if you used professional services. The Wired piece especially goes into detail of how this works by providing endless real world examples such as InnoCentive, and TurkNation. This system works not only for the corporations, but provides countless incentives for the service and content providers as well.

While the effects of social networking tools on corporate America is interesting and while they certainly are a part of the answer to the initial question, there is still a large part of the question left unanswered. What advantages are these shared efforts creating? It’s so much more than saving overhead costs and allowing more people to freelance doing exactly what they love. I’m talking about the shared community aspect that Shirky discusses. Shirky states: “we are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations” (p. 21, emphasis mine). This statement could not be truer than it is today. One simply has to turn to the protestors in the Middle East to see these social tools put to work in coordinating collective action that brought about changes that really matter.

Perhaps Shirky was looking into the future as his book (published in 2008) may as well be a blueprint for what’s going on in the news right this very second. The only difference is that we’re not talking about change in the sense that Colgate saved a few thousand dollars on scientific services; we’re talking about real political change that flipped thousands of people’s worlds around in a matter of 18 days. My favorite quote from Shirky’s book is “communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring ... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen” (p. 105). Perhaps social networking tools are approaching this level of significance, because the profound changes seem to be happening at a lightening pace these days.

The Twitter Revolution

The topic for this week is citizen journalism and participation. My blog post will discuss this topic with a focus on how Twitter is revolutionizing the game. It seems to me that there has been a long-standing debate in academia in regards to new media: is it a form of media that dramatically alters the foundations of mass media research, or is it simply another platform for regurgitating the same information in multiple ways with no real effects? The readings for this week address this debate better than any we’ve read so far.

Gil De Zuniga et al. (2009) begin by taking a political stance and asking whether or not political blogs are changing the political environment. While they do find that blog use is related to an increase in political participation online, they fail to find evidence to support the hypothesis that blog use correlates with political participation in the real world. I have trouble with the study as a whole because the hypothesis that they failed to confirm seems to me to be the most important one. I don’t think it’s a far stretch to assume that people who participate on political blogs will go to other politically relevant sites to participate. If it doesn’t translate to these individuals going offline to actually vote or to try and inspire others to vote, then what’s the point the authors are trying to make?

At first glance, this study seems to support the argument that new media don’t really have much of an effect. However, I see this study as merely the beginning of a practice that is in its infancy and has already and will continue to evolve. For example, it seems to me (and I unfortunately don’t have any data to back this up with) that blogs are a dying breed. The authors posit that they will wind up having “greater prevalence in the near future,” but I think the social networking site Twitter has overshadowed blogs (for now). Luke Goode posits that we must pay attention to the code, or the “formal properties of any medium” (p. 1303). Blogs use an older type of “code” that entails posting objects and stories and allowing for users of the site (presumably already politically oriented individuals) to comment whereas Twitter links the content of many people to many others and uses trending topics to broadcast public agendas that span all topics to a diverse set of users. Given its format, it’s logical to assume that Twitter would have a better chance at reaching and motivating those who are not already politically interested; therefore, a similar study surveying Twitter users as opposed to blog users would perhaps provide a more realistic picture of the effects of online tools on the political environment.

Twitter’s format should also change the way we think of citizen journalism. Goode looks specifically at social news sites like Digg.com in an attempt to conceptualize the idea of citizen journalism. He grapples with the question of whether we should restrict the definition of citizen journalism to “practices in which citizens act as content creators, producing original news material” (p. 1290). (For an example of this type of content, see the piece by Antony and Thomas (2010) discussing the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant where passengers in a subway station shot and disseminated video of an incident of police brutality.) Goode argues that we shouldn’t limit citizen journalists to those who create content because popular bloggers like Matt Drudge can post existing content that then inspires readers to comment and share the link. This idea encompasses the heart of Twitter. In the realm of social networking sites, Twitter is closer to a social news site than any other and is different from traditional social news sites in that, due to its code, it creates a broader conversation.

Lastly, many of the articles addressed the idea that new media provide ordinary citizens with the ability to set the public agenda. Goode identified that many of the first sites that allowed for this type of participation (i.e. – Digg.com) still had gatekeepers to deal with in the form or moderators and even professional editorial staff who select and filter content. Twitter truly does have the capability to allow citizens to set the agenda as there are no moderators or editors involved. To take it even a step further, one survey researcher (Conner et. al, 2010) compared the conversation on Twitter to the results of several prominent public opinion polls and found that what the public found to be relevant correlated to word frequencies found in Twitter messages. In this way, Twitter is already contributing to the national debate. Still it is not a perfect system. As sites like Klout.com reveal, some Twitter users have more social capital than others, and therefore more control over the agenda.

Social Networking

My blog posting this week will focus mainly on the article by Shirky (2011) that discusses the role of social media in democracy. The reason I’m focusing on this article is because I find it to be incredibly timely considering the recent liberation of Egypt. It’s almost as if the author was able to look into the future to predict that the protests in Egypt would result in Mubarak being ousted from power. It’s uncommon for an academic to get lucky enough to have historic events give life to his or her research, but Shirky had an idea and capitalized on it at exactly the right time.

The article opens with the following question: Do digital tools enhance democracy? Shirky’s answer is as follows: “these tools probably do not hurt in the short run and might help in the long run -- and that they have the most dramatic effects in states where a public sphere already constrains the actions of the government.” This is a natural question addressing a theme that the mainstream media seems to have finally picked up on.

It would be interesting to see if social media as a political tool in foreign nations, or political action outside of a two-party system, democratic atmosphere becomes a theme in the media. In the vein of Arceneaux and Smith Weiss’s study, the coverage of Facebook’s role in the Egypt protests would fall under what the authors called the civic use category. Would future research find this theme to be positive or negative? I expect this theme to be huge over the next year with the impending instability in the Middle East.

At first glance, it seems that social networking will play a huge role in the coverage of Egypt and more than likely any future revolutions that arise in the Middle East. I was watching Egypt coverage on CNN all day on Friday as Mubarak announced that he would step down. I noticed that CNN gave major credit to Facebook as an organizer of the protests in Egypt. I don’t say that they gave credit to Facebook as a tool in the organization of the protests, but they actually seemed to personify Facebook as if it in itself was solely responsible for Egypt’s freedom.

Shirky would say, and I would agree, that social media cannot be held responsible for political change as CNN suggested, but instead should be thought of as a complementary tool that encourages motivated people to motivate quickly and in a more coordinated manner than they would without social media. Though it would be easy to jump up and say, “look what Facebook did in Egypt!,” it is not entirely realistic. People have found ways to motivate groups well before social media existed. Indeed, Shirky outlines the various ways that mediums such as the printing press and the photo copier have aided in organizing movements. Still, social media can drastically decrease the time it takes to disseminate valuable information. Egypt’s liberation was brought about in 18 days! This would arguably have taken much longer without the help of the Internet. In addition to speed, Shirky states that social media’s most valuable asset in organizing movements is that it can “compensate for the disadvantages of undisciplined groups by reducing the costs of coordination.” So it seems Shirky is ahead of the curve in thinking how social media can aid in political movements through the organization of protests. Certainly he is ahead of CNN.

Week 3, Mobile Technology

My blog for this week focuses mainly on the articles by Gordon (2007), Gillespie (2010), Orgad (2009), and Sooryamoorthy et al. (2008). I chose these articles because, unlike the article by Goggin and Spurgeon (2007) that deals mainly with technological and economic issues, the aforementioned articles handle new media issues from a more academic point of view. In addition, the authors I discuss here relate more to my research interests by discussing the potential or future effects of new media on the population or on the news industry itself, rather than discussing the evolution of the technology or the potential to draw a profit from the technology.

When discussing Mobile TV, Orgad makes the following statement: “it seems that at the heart of contemporary discussions on mobile TV is a tension between new and old.” This remark basically sums up the current academic debate not just on Mobile TV, but on any form of new media. Researchers argue whether the many forms of new media combine to create the potential to drastically change the landscape of mass media as we know it, or if new media are simply reinventions of older technologies with a few added twists that in the long will result in relatively little dynamic change. It seems this is the hot question in communication research currently, and one that we are only beginning to find an answer to.

Gordon (2007) toys with the idea of the citizen journalist emerging as a result of the new broadcasting opportunities afforded to many through mobile technologies. He discusses three situations where ordinary citizens have been in the right place at the right time where they stumbled upon an opportunity to record a major media event with the aid of mobile devices. He investigates whether or not this type of citizen journalism can help people to “scoop official sources and thwart censorship and news blackouts.” Again, as Ogden states, this is a debate on how new media “continues to be shaped considerably by the ‘language of the potential’, that is, what the technology might be and how it might affect users (Kennedy, 2008).”

Gordon concludes that while original content can be generated using these devices, it is still distributed and therefore edited by major news organizations. His evidence supports argument that technology, in this case, has not revolutionized journalism, but has merely reinvented the wheel. I argue, however, that citizen journalism is still in its infancy and has not had the time or opportunity to fully evolve into a condition where it will have a significant impact on journalism. Gordon’s article was written in 2007. Since then, Twitter has become a dominant force in social networking. Together with mobile technology, Twitter can be used as a “platform” (see Gillespie, 2010) to lift citizens over the gatekeepers in disseminating original content. As Gillespie states, these new individualized social networking technologies (such as Twitter) are about empowerment. He goes on to stress that, in his view, these technologies are making substantial changes to the media landscape. “This offer of access to everyone comes fitted with an often implicit, occasionally explicit, counterpoint: that such services are therefore unlike the mainstream broadcast­ers, film studios and publishers (p. 353).”

Take the Fort Hood shootings that occurred in 2009 as an example of how citizen journalism is evolving. Everyday citizens who were on site at Fort Hood were able to supply the waiting world with minute by minute updates as to what was happening in real time inside Fort Hood. They not only “scooped” traditional media, but Twitter supplied the technology needed for this information to be disseminated on a wide scale basis. Therefore, with the invention of another technological platform, citizen journalism evolved a tiny step further. With time, the stacked effects this could have on the way the news media works today could be substantial. As Sooryamoorthy et al. (2008) conclude, it is not the adoption of merely one technology that made a difference in how people in India socially interact; but, it was the adoption of multiple technologies that made all the difference.