Online Fears?
Posted by lewisa on October 31, 2008
In Ancient Rome the news was carved onto stone or metal and posted in public places. Between 713 and 734, the Tang Dynasty in China handwrote government news onto silk. News wasn’t disseminated in the way which we take for granted until early 18th century with the first regular English daily paper. So, given that journalism and news reporting has always undergone change, restructuring, and adaptation to new technology, why should the latest technological developments create such fear? And why should immediate messaging tools such as Twitter create feelings of uselessness?
“The media in all it’s forms sometimes becomes too cynical, too ready to assume the worst, and to construct the general out of the particular” said Prince Charles in a speech to celebrate 300 years of newspapers in Britain, 11 March 2002. It was if he had already heard Ian Reeves playing the prophet doom with “I have seen the future, and we’re not in it.”
Invention of printers brought us forward from handwritten pamphlets and scrolls. Telegraph technology connected people across countries, and then the telephone did that even better. Wireless radio and television brought the news one step closer to real-time and gave audiences moving pictures and recorded voice clips. All these developments were positive, useful and welcome. Online media, simply merges all these elements into one space and brings it to us faster than ever before. That’s not going to spell the end of journalism; it’s just going to speed things up and change the way things are done. Tools like Twitter , although they can be used by everyone who morphs into a ‘citizen journalist’ from time to time, are things that can be taken full advantage of, to improve and revolutionise journalism.
In April 2008, James Karl Buck , managed to free himself from an Egyptian prison with the one-word Twitter message “arrested.” While an amazing demonstration of how powerful and useful the immediacy of online communication can be, I feel that something important has been slightly overlooked. While detained, Buck was able to send updates of his situation through Twitter messages on his mobile phone every few hours, constantly reporting to everyone who had internet access a blow-by-blow account of what was happening. Up until his “free” Tweet, investigative journalism went real-time, and typed journalism went ‘live’ in the same way only broadcast media had previously been able to do.
In the same way, MG Siegler , writing for VentureBeat.com , recalls the power of using Twitter in conjunction with social conversation and aggregation site FriendFeed during (not after) an earthquake that hit South California, near LA in July of this year. “Minutes after the quake I had various accounts of it and a map of it’s epicentre…the first Tweet came mere seconds after the earthquake hit, the AP pushed out its first wire item on the news nine-minutes after people were already Tweeting.” Before news reports were even broadcasted, MG Siegler had managed to gather enough information to compile eye-witness comments, maps of affected areas and an up-to-date account of what had happened. Enough information for a researched and accurate report of an event, in written form, before any ‘live’ media could disseminate their own coverage.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, writing for ReadWriteWeb.com, describes how he uses Twitter to gather information in a similar way, “Twitter itself is very useful for performing public interviews. By putting out single or multiple questions into our Twitter networks in a call-and-response fashion, we’ve gathered piles of rich research in far less time than it would have taken to try and call people on the phone.”
There have always been technological developments that affect the media, and none have so far served to supplant journalism. Immediacy tools are there to be taken advantage of, and utilised by professional journalists that can realise their power, and combine that with the skill, ethics and professional standards.
