Back on the Psychiatrist's Couch

Nights like tonight make me look back at my life as a newspaper person and let out a long, slow sigh of relief. The Daytona 500 was supposed to take place today, in addition to the Oscars, and an NBA All-Star game in Orlando. Last post I dazzled you with Twitter screenshots. Well, dear readers, today I will use my Facebook friends' posts to illustrate my points.

I used to work with Bruce and commenter Dave in Daytona. We all left the paper at different times for greener pastures, but have since reconnected on Facebook. At least some of us have sympathy for those left behind.

The social media scholar danah boyd points out in "Can social network sites enable political action?" that most people use social media to connect with people they already know. That's what happened tonight. I didn't have the race on, nor will I tune into the Oscars most likely, but I'm connected through Twitter or Facebook to friends who will be tuned into these things. How did I find out the race was postponed? Facebook (see?).

George is a good friend who still works in the Sports department in Daytona. It's nights like tonight that I look to the wonders of Social Media to reconnect me to my old stomping ground.

Our readings for this week ran the gamut of Social Media issues, but I've loosely placed each in one of two camps:

1. Who uses it, how often, and why? 
2. Can it be used for change or to change minds?

What I wish more of the articles addressed were implications of what they'd studied. Granted most were a few years old (a few were 2010-ish), but after reading them, I was often left with the feeling of, "Well, yeah. Of course." I wondered why most of the studies thought that human nature might change when technology is put into the mix.

For example,"The Network in the Garden: Designing Social Media for Rural Life," by Eric Gilbert, Karrie Karahalios, and Christian Sandvig looked at rural vs. urban social media users. Turns out that rural users matched up with the researchers expectations on most counts: they had fewer "friends" (as in Internet contacts, not actual in-person friends), those "friends" were geographically closer to the users, more users were women, and more profiles were kept private.

Another example is in "Dynamic Debates: An Analysis of Group Polarization Over Time on Twitter," by Sarita Yardi and Danah Boyd (you'll see her name a lot in social media research - sometimes traditionally capitalized and others all lowercase). They studied whether Twitter users of a particular slant or viewpoint would engage mostly with users of similar views or if they sought out alternate viewpoints. Not surprising to me they found that the old saying holds true, "birds of a feather flock together."

As I sit here tonight thinking about social media and its users, I just have to look at my own profile pages to see the results of these studies. And I can't help but think these articles studied the wrong things. Social science research has been done for decades now, and we're fairly well researched in the human condition. Why is it so surprising that we'd "follow" or "friend" people who share similar interests and beliefs? Or that rural users would be more cautious or private?

I don't think we should study social media as this new and strange thing, putting its users under microscopes or back on psychiatrists' couches; technology is an extension of humanity - it's not going to change how we behave. Rather, I think it will capture our behavior like a snapshot and keep it for posterity. Those are the implications that should get some attention.

The readings for this week essentially summed up that people use social media for various reasons including narcissism and news dissemination. Who we "friend" and "follow" tell a lot about a person. Tonight, social media tells me that I didn't need to watch the Oscars (or the 500, if it weren't postponed), that's what I have friends and followers for. And they're telling me Christopher Plummer is having a good night:

 

Reconciling skepticism and optimism in a post-paper life

Dan Gillmor would be proud. Or maybe he'd just roll his eyes and say that I used common sense, which should be expected and not applauded. Whichever the case (I'll find out Monday when he comes to our class to chat), when I first heard that Whitney Houston had died, it was on Twitter -- and I doubted it. I first saw it in a tweet from a former newspaper coworker -- someone who's certainly no dummy, much more social- and digital-media adept than I, and a person from whom I'd definitely trust a report.

I still went to three other news sources and checked the originating AP tweet myself before adding my own two cents to the celebrity death 'verse.

I suppose I was Mediactive, a term Gillmor coins in a book-blog-website hybrid release that aims to push the public to be more involved and educated about the news it digests and creates. I read a tweet this morning that Twitter broadcast the news of Houston's death 27 minutes before other media. Is that true? I didn't do much research it, but from what I know of Twitter, and its propensity to spread both real and fake news at lightening-fast speed, I at least give it credence.

This morning brought more news from another former newspaper coworker via Twitter:

As soon as I saw it, I knew what Michael meant and that he, too, was skeptical of this news. News I hadn't seen yet, but I quickly checked other news sites. No, Keanu Reeves is not dead, but he was for a while to a number of folks on Twitter. And I checked the #KeanuReeves hashtag itself, which was already rife with the word "hoax." Whew.

This just showed me that in my little circle of former newspaper folks, we were skeptical of some news and reported others quickly through a nearly instant medium. And when I think of  my little circle of what I call journo-friends or N-J peeps (from our time at the Daytona Beach News-Journal), I realize most of us are out of the business officially these days (but that's a whole other story about the newspaper industry...). Reading "Mediactive" brings up all sorts of issues with that idea. Are we ever really "out" of the business? It doesn't look like it.

While I read this book, I could hear the jeers, sighs, and fist-pounding that my newsroom colleagues would have had with his ideas: "Online media reports can't be trusted and they certainly have no place in print!"; "Give away our content for free?!"; "Let the readers contribute!?" Crazy ideas. Ideas that I now have to consider as integral parts of digital media's future.


Admittedly I'm still trained to bristle at the mention of "citizen journalism." But now I'm that citizen and I must force myself to look at the media from this new vantage point: my couch with all the other folks. I'm fairly certain that I'm slightly more intelligent than those "other folks," but isn't that the thought that got parts of the media into the quandary they're in now -- hubris? As a working-in-the-industry journalist, I had training that most people didn't, access that post people didn't, and power that most people didn't. I had the power to write a headline, decide what story ran from a practically bottomless pool of possibilities, and maybe more importantly, the power to decide what didn't run.  Now my power lies in my ability to research and filter good news from bad. I'd like to think I can do that better than the average, non-journalist-Joe, but I bet I'm wrong.

Gillmor puts forth an optimistic view of the media landscape; he's confident that, together, we can bring out the best of our knowledge and journalistic instincts. I'm working on being an optimist. Ten years in a newsroom is a lot to work through.

Lots of Information

We read "The Information," by James Gleick for this week. The enormity of this book equals its content; from drum beats to Wikipedia, it covers the rise and transformation of information through the ages.

Like most readers, I like a good story. I wish Gleick would have sewn ideas together a bit more and told a story instead of presenting us with history lesson after history lesson. However, I bet the former was his intent. By writing and constructing it the way he did, he made his point: There's a lot to take in, to understand, and it's a complicated  journey from drum beat to byte.

An interesting question to ask after digesting this read is, "What are we going to do with all of this information?" I don't mean the book itself, though it is daunting and even dubbed "aspirational" by a New York Times reviewer. I mean with everything being in the cloud now, or at least on its way, what's next? Sure, we can catalog all that is for future generations, but then what? Will they continue to do the same? Will Wikipedia never end, having every page on every gas station archived for eternity? I envision a time when there's no cloud because everything is the cloud - TV, mail, all our personal records, banking transactions - all that stuff. I suppose all that information will still be stored then, too, but in a way I can't even fathom.

But that's the point of, "The Information" -- to show me that science and technology will answer my question for me. There will be a new theory, invention, or idea to come along and make me realize why all of the information is a good thing and show me what future generations can do with it.

I wish Gleick would have talked about the economic impact of all this information (perhaps it will be in the sequel?). It costs a lot of money (now) to store huge quantities of anything -- a reason cloud computing has become so popular. Granted, as technology progresses, so will the availability of it, but what does that mean for the moment? Or for countries who don't have the infrastructure to catalog their "right now" as tomorrow's history?

Maybe Wikipedia will catalog important things for those who can't type it right now. When it comes to that anyone-can-edit online encyclopedia, I'm an inclusionist (tho most of this post may make me sound like a deletionist). Let's write it all down and let technology catch up with us. Let's acknowledge we have too much information right now and see what the mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists of today and tomorrow can invent for the next big step.