Social Media

Vienna.
The next speakers at Challenge Social Innovation are Christoph Kaletka, Ricard Ruiz de Querol, and Bastian Pelka, who are presenting nothing short of a manifesto for social media and social innovation. Social media, Bastian starts, are not a technology, but a specific form of using existing technology: a social innovation. Social media is an umbrella term for a rapidly growing set of practices and platforms, which are based around the core innovation of user-generated content as a new social routine.

Social media, then, describe a new communication pattern (a paradigm shift in communication), which replaces finished communicative processes with always-unfinished, collaboratively developed, incrementally evolving outcomes that are developed through bottom-up, collaborative, and distributed processes. Such shifts are in line with the overall shift from the industrial to the knowledge society; in the process, knowledge and content production processes are decentralised. Not least, this changes conventional ideas of ‘quality’, of course.

Vienna.
The next session at Challenge Social Innovation starts with my own paper, on Twitter as a case for social innovation (and the challenges which exist in such a proprietary environment, governed by competing interests). My Powerpoint is below, and I’ll try to add the audio later the audio is online now, too. The full paper is also online here.

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Alfred Hermida, who is interested in how news consumption changes as a result of the greater use of social networking platforms. Such users may now start to constitute network publics: mediated public spheres where networking technologies and social interactions influence one another. How does such a networked audience use the news?

The Pew Center has already shown that 75% of U.S. audiences get part of their news via email and other sharing; this mediated sociability is increasingly simply part of what we do, and social media have infiltrated our daily habits. What questions does that raise for the media industry, which has long managed to control its content distribution channels?

Alfred conducted a national survey in Canada to examine how people consume online news; of the 1600 people surveyed, some 1000 also visited social networking sites at least once per month. Half of the Canadian population is on Facebook, some 20% of Canadians are on Twitter. Do such networks play a role in the distribution of news, then?

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism is Jeroen de Keyser, whose interest is in how Web 2.0 has changed the presentation of ordinary people’s views in newspapers. Traditionally, journalists view citizens as sources only for anecdotal (eyewitness, vox pop) information; otherwise, they prefer elite actors as sources. As a result, few everyday citizens are visible in news output, and they are mostly positioned to be of low importance.

Web 2.0 has changed this situation somewhat, both through the introduction of citizen journalism practices and by making a wider range of everyday sources available to journalists. Does this lead to ‘ordinary peoople’ appearing more often and more prominently, then?

Jeroen undertook a content analysis of five daily papers in Flanders (two quality, two tabloid papers from three different companies), comparing samples of their news coverage from 2001 (pre-Web 2.0) and 2011. All articles which included ordinary citizens (through quotes or mentions) were included in the dataset.

Cardiff.
The next paper session at Future of Journalism 2011 starts with Megan Knight, whose interest is in the impact of social media on newsgathering. She’s already examined the level of social media-based sourcing of mainstream news reporting in the context of popular protests in the Middle East - which appears to remain relatively low; however, does such low overt use hide a greater amount of use of social media not as direct sources, but as generating story ideas and providing background which is then pursued further my journalists sourcing information from more powerful sources?

Megan pursued this question by observing the reporting processes at a major national daily newspaper in the U.K., as well as interviewing key actors and conducting content analysis. She found that stories originated overwhelmingly with state institutions, corporations, and government bodies; indeed, journalists increasingly appear to wait for power elites to approach them, rather than contacting them directly.

Cardiff.
Leslie-Jean Thornton finishes the session at Future of Journalism by discussing the spread of information on Twitter. She points us to the San Diego fire and the #sandiegofire hashtag, which really was a breakthrough for the use of hashtags on Twitter; this was the first time that hashtags were successfully used for the coordination of discussion around major crisis events.

It is interesting for such breaking news stories to examine the timeline of events on Twitter, of course; this also requires detailed qualitative, even ethnographic work. Early on, journalism on these events hasn’t even emerged yet, so we can study how events are being characterised by the users who just raised them; especially at these early stages, gatewatching and citizen journalism practices may be able to be observed particularly clearly.

Cardiff.
Our own paper was next at the Future of Journalism conference. Here’s the presentation (and the full paper) – audio to follow soon, hopefully… now online, too.

Cardiff.
Tim Baikjewicz is the next speaker at Future of Journalism 2011, and his interest, too, is in social media in journalism. They have now become an obsession for many news media; news organisations are focussing mainly on pushing content, cultivating sources, and building ‘communities’ (though their understanding of community might be substantially different from those of actual social media users).

It is also interesting in this context to examine the social media sources that news media now draw on. This follows the trajectory of previous work examining the use of blog-based material by major news organisations. How do newspapers use social media sources, then, how often and prominently do they do so, and are there obvious differences in how they are used?

Cardiff.
The next session at Future of Journalism 2011 starts with the fabulous Alfred Hermida, whose focus is on the shift of news organisations to digital, networked environments, with specific reference to Twitter. How do journalists find a place in this, and especially, how do they deal with verifying information on those platforms?

Twitter is used for a variety of purposes, of course, and the volume of messages on this platform is immense. This represents the lives, interests, and views of its users – and includes acts of journalism; Twitter can be seen as a platform for ambient journalism, therefore. This challenges established ways of communication for journalism, usually about current things, and it disrupts the way we think about space and time, private and public. For journalists, it disrupts truth (or the pursuit of truth, which they have elevated to their ultimate professional goal): discovering and reporting truth by journalism is seen as essential to the profession.

Cardiff.
If it’s Thursday, it must be Wales: I’ve made it to the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, which starts with a keynote by Emily Bell. She begins by noting that discussions about the future of journalism only started in the UK with the Murdoch papers’ move to Wapping, and it has been mainly about the role of technology in the transformation of journalism; before then, there was a strong commitment to continue doing journalism as it had always been done.

Today, journalism is becoming less defined by the business models that support it, and more by the activities which it consists of – types of journalistic activity are now scattered widely across many domains. Journalism is a craft, and arguing over who might or might not be a journalism today is futile. If Julian Assange or Rebekah Brooks say they’re journalists, or a random citizen taking first-hand footage does so, who is to say they aren’t? We may gather random forms of activity, and ask whether they are journalistic, but there’s little point in doing so any more.