When we discuss the relative merits of live blogging in contrast to traditional media, we must take into account Neil Postman’s argument that we shape the tools, and then the tools shape us. In a recursive cycle where technological development and social change lead to other technologies and more social change, the winners and losers of the exchanges are never neatly segmented.
Corporate mass media has owned everything—from the research to the writing, from the means of production to the distribution. Local papers couldn’t afford to have correspondents in various places around the world, so the bigger outlets controlled the flow of that information and profited from it. Now the means of production has decreased to the point where the “barbarian masses†are able to stake out a piece of the wilderness to settle and occupy. The connections between these new media citizens are now giving rise to new organizations and arrangements facilitated by the fluid platforms of Facebook, Blogger, Ning, Twitter and “the next big thing.â€
Trust is a central exploration of Menzies’ analysis—can we trust a live blogger who is speculating, thinking on her feet, fishing for some new info-bit to talk about? Can we trust Peter Mansbridge later in the day when he presents a more formal and, it is assumed, authoritative analysis of the events? Can we trust the durability of a fragmented, tribal landscape more or less than a powerful media conglomerate that very liberally applies a “they don’t know what didn’t make the news†approach? The fragmentation of mass media is not simply a result of blogging over the last few years. Long before blogging was possible, the broadcast world was multiplying channel options in a frantic micro-niche race to try and gain dedicated eyeballs. Magazine publishing has followed similar paths. With the emergence of web 2.0 and beyond, we are seeing more movement in that direction, as the means of production and distribution have shifted from corporate outbound to public co-creation.
We still evaluate relationships and organizations based on trust. Our decision to listen to or ignore someone on an important matter will depend a great deal on how credible we believe the source to be. Studies and statistics and data have multiplied exponentially, making issues of trust more important than ever. I recently read a book on business innovation, published in 2000, which pointed out the great merits of Enron as a very progressive corporate citizen. Progressive indeed. The ascendancy of eBay has been facilitated by a low threshold for participation, together with a means to establish the credibility of participants through a ranking system. A hundred years ago, in a small town, you may have had only word of mouth; now, you get ranked by other eBay users in a global, digital village.
Credibility is as important as ever—perhaps more so. What has changed, however, is the way in which credibility is gained and lost. It used to be that the size of your office building, the luxury of the interior appointments, and the suits of your executive team all served to lend credibility to your operation. You had made it; you had things under control; you were a safe bet for other people’s money; you could be trusted as a regulator; you could be relied on to deliver the news objectively, whatever the format. If you ran a tight ship, kept all the barriers between your organization and the wider public carefully maintained, and controlled all the messaging about yourself, you maintained your credibility.
Those mechanisms of credibility are changing.
There have been too many failures on the part of large, trusted corporations. As Menzies points out, this has led to decreased trust and has been manifested in decreasing credibility. Beyond blogging—micro or otherwise—these are a few of the emerging new parameters of corporate credibility.
TRANSPARENCY
If I can’t see what you are doing or find out more about you easily, I will assume you are trying to hide something. The more layers of bureaucracy there are between me and the decision-making process, the more I will feel like direct, open, clear responses are simply not going to happen. Since I can probably find out a lot about you online anyway, trying to keep the one-way mirror in place probably won’t work. At the very least, I will choose to do business with, or consume media from, a source that is more transparent than you, because then I will know what I’m getting and I will have been spared the trouble of ferreting out your delinquencies.
AUTHENTICITY
If you only give me spin, then I won’t believe you even when you are telling the truth. I want to know that I’m dealing with real people in a context that I understand or can learn more about if I choose. If you don’t know what the future holds, it’s better for you to be honest about it than it is to pretend you know something that you really don’t. Print might go away in an archive that will take deep dedication to access in five years; but online, your content has a much longer and much more accessible life. You might give away 50 million dollars each year to protect the environment because you say it really matters to you, but when I look you up and discover that you earn ten times that much every week in an industry that is exploiting the environment, you won’t feel like a trusted source. If the dynamics of reporting on an international conflict are complicated, you need to come clean about that rather than giving me something that is trite and tidy.
PARTICIPATION
If our exchange is only one-sided and you do all the talking, I will assume that you are trying to sell me on something or manipulate me. As someone once said, if you build it, I might use it—but if we build it, I will use it. Maybe in the past being a good citizen included reading the paper regularly, but today, good citizenship means contributing something of value to the conversation, not just reading someone else’s summary of events. If your editorial department only listens to people in power or individuals with cultural capital and denies me an opportunity to meaningfully interact with and co-create content around the issues or events involved, then you will fail to engage me over time. I will simply move on to places where I can read, watch, listen and freely interact with the generators of the content and, perhaps even more importantly, connect laterally with other people who share my interest in the matter at hand.
It seems to me, no matter what journalism has stood for in the most compelling moments of the craft, that telling the truth, particularly when it has been costly, is among the most important reasons for its existence. Whether it is pixels or ink on paper, this remains a very vital function. In a robust and resilient society, people who are dedicated to investigating and reporting what is going on around us remain indispensible. The movement from consolidation (as seen in mass media) to diversification (as seen in various social technologies) has not eradicated that need. The responsibility for understanding how a diversified media landscape can be misused—and guarding against it—is as critical today as has been the responsibility we have had to this point in time to understand how a consolidated media landscape can be turned to ignoble ends. New and different kinds of power consolidation are happening through Google, with its galactic appetite for data collection, sorting, sifting and sharing. Engaged citizens need to actively understand the risks and rewards that such mass accumulations of data and cloud-based computing represent.
Indie media, citizen documentaries and other types of grassroots-driven mergers of low-cost technology and online distribution can strengthen our social fabric. An example of this work is the National Film Board of Canada’s filmmaker-in-residence program that has, of late, featured the work of Katerina Cizek, who uses immersive strategies to get the voice of under-represented people into her documentaries. She talks about making media with people rather than simply about people, working through a long-established institutaion to explore new ways of helping others with indie-style approaches to digital filming.
New technologies represent opportunities for building or destroying, oppressing or freeing. The vicissitudes of the human heart ensure that the spectrum of possibilities between those poles will continue to be represented. Journalism, at its best, plays a vital role in pushing the balance toward the good, the true and the beautiful, regardless of the medium.