Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my blog, follow me on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook and you'll never miss a post again!
On 6 December 2008, after 15-year-old student Alexandros Grigoropoulos died from a gunshot wound inflicted by a policeman, Epaminondas Korkoneas, after an altercation between a police patrol and a small group of youths in Athens, Greece erupted into violent riots that are still going on two weeks later (see Wikipedia, NowPublic, Mahalo, The Boston Globe Big Picture).
The riots have once again shown, just as they did during the 11/26 Mumbai terror attack, that legacy media often lags behind participatory media in crisis reporting. Andrew Liam (via Patrick Meier and Howard Rheingold), who was in Athens to attend the Global Forum for Media Development, quotes Greek columnist and TV commentator Pavlos Tsimas –
Thousands of people were in the street protesting the murder of a boy whose name they didn’t know. Established media have not yet reported the event. TV stations came in a little late. The next day the newspapers did not carry words of the event with the exception of some sports papers that carried the story due to late night printing.
However, the Greece riots have also exposed the scary underside of online citizen activism. It’s widely believed that the flash riots were organized largely by young people, using mobile phones and social networks.
Andrew Liam insists that the legacy media failed in separating fact from rumour in the social media coverage of the Greece riots and the event was a signal of the irrelevance of legacy media –
As witnessed in Greece, the failure to verify information by the public and media professionals can be tragic. There was a universal assumption in Greece that the teenager was shot in cold blood, and no one bothered to wait for the coroner’s report. The policeman’s claim that he was innocent – that he had shot into the air to disperse the crowd– was summarily dismissed.
It is a dangerous world, indeed, when citizen reporters are completely trusted, both by the media institutions that incorporate them and by the audience who consume that information. The role of the mature news organization, one should think, is to filter real news from pseudo news, rather than treating all content as equal.
(The coroner’s report came out several days later, but there is still some confusion about whether the bullet ricocheted before hitting the teenager.)
Katrin Verclas provides a counterpoint to Andrew’s assertions –
I was very puzzled by Andrew Lam’s post. I was in Greece at the very conference he was talking about and believe that he is very wrong in his assertions.
And yes, I did go out at night, as did various others, interviewing peaceful demonstrators, rock-throwing youngsters, shop keepers, and police and getting doused in tear gas. Why did Andrew stay stuck in the hotel? It was just a short walk from where the city was burning.
There was continuous coverage on all Greek television stations, radio, and in the papers, the BBC and CNN had coverage, there were numerous people taking photos, twittering in English, Greek, and other languages. There was a tag – #griots, and you can see lots of Quik video — in addition to the all-night news coverage on every channel, roundtable discussions, and commentary from activists, politicians, and researchers in Greece.
This is not to say that Lam’s main point is not a valid one. Context, background, and thoughtful discussion — as well as distinguishing fact from rumor and innuendo from research — are important by all who are swept up in an event. But Andrew Lam gets it wrong if he thinks that Athens, Greece was that example. He would have seen that had he bothered to go outside.
Evgeny Morozov in The Economist calls the Greece riots “networked anarchy” –
The psychological impulse behind the Greek protests—a sense of rage against all authority, which came to a head after a 15-year-old boy was killed by a police bullet—can now be transmitted almost instantaneously. These days, images (moving as well as still) spread faster than words; and images, of course, transcend language barriers.
E-communications are now a familiar feature in pro-democracy protests against dictators. Equally fast-moving, say specialists, is the role of technology in what might be called “undemocratic protests”: violent acts in prosperous, networked societies.
This became obvious during the French riots of 2005, when teenagers posted blogs that urged people to “burn the cops”—and made massive use of text messages to co-ordinate the protests. The youths that trashed Budapest in 2006 relied on blogs to enlist supporters, and distribute an audio recording of the prime minister admitting government corruption.
Hungarian blogs were also used to aggregate visual evidence of police brutality. There were novel online projects such as an “Interactive Riot Walkthrough”, which superimposed photos of the latest events on a map of Budapest, offering “virtual tours” of the city as it burned.
Already, the Greek riots are prompting talk of a new era of networked protest. The volume of online content they have inspired is remarkable. Photos and videos of the chaos, often shot with cellphones, were posted online almost in real time. Twitter, a service for exchanging short messages, has brimmed with live reports from the streets of Athens, most of them in Greek but a few in English.
A tribute to the slain teenager—a clip of photos with music from a popular rock band—appeared on YouTube, the video-sharing site, shortly after his death; more than 160,000 people have seen it. A similar tribute group on Facebook has attracted more than 130,000 members, generating thousands of messages and offering links to more than 1,900 related items: images of the protests, cartoons and leaflets.
A memorial was erected in Second Life, a popular virtual environment, giving its users a glimpse of real-life material from the riots. Many other online techniques—such as maps detailing police deployments and routes of the demonstrations—came of age in Athens. And as thousands of photos and videos hit non-Greek blogs and forums, small protests were triggered in many European cities.
The spread of sympathy protests over what began as a local Greek issue has big implications for the more formal anti-globalisation movement. That movement has ignored the idea of spontaneous but networked protest, and instead focused on taking large crowds to set-piece events like summits. Such methods look outdated now. Governments are not the only things that networked “anarchy” threatens.
Associated Press (via Tim Boucher) also reports on how internet and mobile helped spread the discontent behind the Greece riots to the rest of Europe –
At least some of the protests were organized over the Internet, showing how quickly the message of discontent can be spread, particularly among tech-savvy youth.
Across the continent, Internet sites and blogs have popped up to spread the call to protest.
Several Greek Web sites offered protesters real-time information on clash sites, where demonstrations were heading and how riot police were deployed around the city. Protest marches were arranged and announced on the sites and via text message on cell phones.
Elsewhere in Europe, reports about the clashes in Greece were quickly picked up online by citizen journalists, some of whom posted details of confrontations on Twitter.
Patrick Meier tries to find a better taxonomy to describe the Greece riots –
I think we need a better taxonomy for today’s new media. Individuals who find themselves in the middle of the action and send text messages or camera shots from their phones are not journalists in the conventional sense of the word. Adding “citizen” in front of journalism is perhaps too simplistic.
First of all, in repressive contexts, “citizen journalists” are not really citizens of their country; they tend to be marginalized, oppressed and persecuted. The term “civilian journalism” may be more apt. But we’ve already established that the qualifier “journalism” muddies the waters.
The Greek students rioting in the streets of Athens could not be described as a “smart mob” either. I wouldn’t use the term “dumb mobs” because I don’t find that any more accurate than describing the rioters as anarchists. Indeed, I think The Economist article gets it particularly wrong on that note.
In this context, then, perhaps a term like “snap mobs” might be more useful. Snap implies quick and plays on terms like “snapshot” and “snap judgment” which is a better description of the student-led riots in Greece.
Finally, Oliver Marks at ZDNet says that there’s a “negative news bias” in discussions about the role of social media in the Greece riots –
Although the media focus on the more sensational aspects of the protests by ‘extremists, idiots and provocateurs’ thousands are protesting more peacefully for change in Greece. These people, although using the same online tags and with the same core desire for change, don’t get the publicity or the international discussion engendered by more pyrotechnic and therefore photogenic activity.
Covert and overt usage of collaboration technologies is incredibly powerful, the catalyst for usage is in the motivation of the users.
Harnessing positive motivations, whether in a business setting or a public one, is the real challenge to empower force for lasting good.
Although I am quite a supporter of the use of social media for reporting, I am fast becoming aware of some of it’s pitfalls. I think one big one is how to separate “armchair journalism” from actual reporting. Sitting in a room and reporting on an incident (via twitter or any means) or clicking one picture of any incident, in my opinion, is not real journalism. How do you separate armchair journalism from actual reporting? You may get several perspectives from different tweets on twitter but again that’s the perspective of people who can afford to be online all the time. How do you bring those voices in the picture that are not online?
@Priyanka: You are right. It’s important to hear from people on the ground, who are witness to the developing situation. At the same time, it’s also important to curate news that is coming out both from participatory media and legacy media and make sense of it. Both roles are important in their own right.