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.
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