Tagged: Legacy Media RSS

  • Gaurav Mishra 1:56 pm on March 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Digital Planet, , , Legacy Media, , , , Steven Johnson, , ,   

    My SXSW Interview with BBC on How Social Media is Changing News Internationally 

    Welcome back to Gauravonomics Blog! Subscribe to my feed now and you'll never miss a single post!

    I was at the South by Southwest Festival last week and my question in Steven Johnson’s session on the Ecosystem of News led to an interview with Gareth Mitchell of BBC’s Digital Planet.

    Here’s the full MP3 podcast. Steven Johnson’s interview on the ecosystem of news is from 4:45 to 10:15. My interview on how social media is changing news internationally is from 10:15 to 13:45.

    Basically, I say that the intersection between legacy media and participatory media is unique for each country.

    The usual narrative of participatory media democratizing news and breaking the business model of traditional news organizations is only valid in the United States and Western Europe.

    Many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America haven’t ever had an independent traditional news media ecosystem, and participatory media, especially blogging, has quickly become an important source of credible news. China is a good example of how participatory media has forced the government controlled traditional media to become more transparent and responsive.

    On the other hand, many other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America have a very vibrant news media ecosystem and they are still thriving, in spite of the growing importance of participatory media. India is a great example, and both newspapers and television channels are doing very well.

    It’s tempting to explain away these difference as time lags. Yes, the time lag logic holds true in terms of internet and participatory media penetration, but there is almost no time lag in terms of the technology that is available to those who do have access. In any case, the penetration and form of participatory media usage is only one of the factors involved here. The other factor is the specific form and development of the traditional news media ecosystem in each country, and these differences can hardly be explained away in terms of time lags.

    China is an extreme example to prove this point. Participatory media usage in China is perhaps less than five years behind the United States in terms of universal access. However, the news media ecosystem in China is unique and won’t become similar to the United States in ten years, or even a hundred years. Therefore, the intersection between participatory media and traditional media in China has to be understood in its specific social, cultural and political context.

    India is more similar to United States than China in terms of its traditional news media ecosystem. Both participatory media and traditional media in India are developing on a lag as compared to the US. However, even in the case of India, the intersection between participatory media and traditional media is unique, because the lag cycles are different for the two. In some way, traditional news organizations in India will have less time to come to terms with the power of participatory media (the Mumbai terror attack and the Pink Chaddi campaign are good examples of this). In other ways, Indian news organizations will have more time to tweak their business models to stay profitable in spite of participatory media.

    Does this mean that we can’t draw any conclusions about how social media is changing news (or business, or civil society, or government) internationally? Yes, we can, but those conclusions would be most valid if we look for them beyond the United States, and, even then, we would do well to understand the (national or regional) context before applying them indiscriminately.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 5:32 pm on January 19, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Camera Phone, , Citizen Journalist, Crash-landing, , , , Flight 1549, Hudson River, Legacy Media, , , , , News Diamond, News Lifecycle, , Paul Bradshaw, , , , US Airways, X Breaking News,   

    The Digital News Lifecycle: Why Breaking News on Twitter isn’t News Anymore 

    (Even) I’m getting a little tired of reading newspaper articles and blog posts on how Twitter was the first source of news alert on the US Airways flight 1549 crash-landing in New York’s Hudson river (see Twitter, Twitpic, Wikipedia, Venture Beat, Silicon Alley Insider, BBC dot.life Blog, The Guardian, WSJ Digits, WebProNews, CNet).

    Let’s get used to it. From this moment onwards, every accident worth reporting, anywhere in the world, will be reported first, via SMS, by a bystander who has a mobile phone. In most cases, the first photos or videos of the accident will be taken by a bystander who has a camera phone. If the accident occurs in a developed country, or a metro city in a developing country, the SMS will be sent to a microblogging service like Twitter and the photos and videos will be uploaded to photo- and video-sharing websites like Flickr and YouTube. From this moment onwards, we will do well to expect it to happen, and reserve our surprise for the cases when it doesn’t happen.

    The Digital News Lifecycle

    In fact, going forward, we can expect to see the following news lifecycle for almost all unplanned breaking news stories (adapted from the “news diamond” by Paul Bradshaw via Valeria Maltoni) –

    1. Twitter Alert: A bystander (accidental citizen journalist) will break the story via Twitter.

    2. Blog Post: News organizations and bloggers will pick up the story and write a quick blog post about it, often with a link to the tweet or the photo.

    3. Article/ Package: News organizations will convert the story into a 300 word newspaper article or a 3 minute TV story.

    4. Context: Bloggers, news organizations and Wikipedia contributors will quickly start compiling background material on the story.

    5. Analysis: Bloggers and news organizations will offer in-depth analysis on the story, and news organizations will often interview the bloggers who have broken the story or provided the most context on it, as part of their analysis.

    6. Conversation: The conversation will continue in the comments sections of blogs and news websites, on Twitter and on social networking, social voting, and social bookmarking websites.

    7. Customization: The entire story, across multiple formats and sources, will be available as an archive that can be searched by tags, accessed in various formats, including RSS feeds, and recombined to provide context for future stories.

    As the news story will move through its lifecycle, both the depth of the story and its reach will increase, hit the peak in the context or analysis stage, and then decrease thereafter, as the interest in the story decreases. The story will move from alert to analysis in an hour, a day, or a week, depending on the nature of the news. The conversation and customization stages will in the domain of the long tail and go on almost indefinitely, driven by search.

    I must also say that my “news lifecycle” is different from Paul Bradshaw’s “news diamond” in two ways –

    1. Paul’s “news diamond” looks at news from a news organization’s perspective, whereas my “news lifecycle” acknowledges that the boundaries between news creators, news curators and news consumers have blurred beyond recognition.

    2. Paul does not make the distinction between unplanned breaking news events (like accidents and terrorist attacks) and planned live coverage of events (like the Super Bowl or the US presidential inauguration). Paul’s “news diamond” and my “news lifecycle” models are much more valid for unplanned breaking news events.

    Once we accept that such a “news lifecycle” model will become the norm, from hereon, we can look beyond the hype about the efficiency and speed of participatory media and focus on the following questions –

    1. How do we increase the number and variety of sources in the process of creating, curating and consuming news?

    2. How do we separate signal from noise during each stage of the news lifecycle?

    3. How do we contract the “alert” to “analysis” stages of the news lifecycle, in order to get better signal to noise ratio sooner in the cycle?

    4. How to we expand the “conversation” to “customization” stages of the news lifecycle, in order to maximize the returns from the content we have created?

    5. How do we expand the requisite participatory media ecosystem so that exceptions to this news lifecycle (like the information void in the Israel-Hamas Gaza conflict or the Russia-Georgia Otessia conflict) become increasingly rare?

    Any thoughts?

    Cross-posted on my personal blog.

     

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  • Gaurav Mishra 1:04 am on January 10, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Everywhere Magazine, JPG Magazine, Legacy Media, , OhMyNews, ,   

    Bad News for Participatory Media: OhMyNews Ends Payment System and 8020 Media Announces Closure 

    Laura Oliver at journalism.co.uk reports that South Korean citizen journalism website OhMyNews is replacing its CyberCash payment system for citizen reporters on its international website with a monthly prize system, citing financial concerns.

    Contributors currently receive between 2,000 to 20,000 South Korean won depending on whether their story appears on the site’s homepage, within a section tab, or elsewhere on the website.

    The fee system will be replaced with three monthly prizes: a 300,000 Korean won first prize for the article that creates the most buzz, and two 100,000 Korean won prizes for editor’s picks based on the quality, timeliness and overall excellence of the reporting or analysis.

    In a related story Joe Garofoli in SFGates reports that 8020 Media, which use online crowdsourcing to create printed magazines like JPG and Everywhere, announced that it was ceasing operations.

    It’s obvious, then, that newspapers aren’t the only ones feeling the pain of the recession. Participatory media outlets, which have much lower cost structures, are also hurt by the tightening of the ad budgets. I wonder how many more casualties we will see in both legacy media and participatory media before we reach the other side of the recession.

     

  • Gaurav Mishra 5:11 pm on January 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Citizen Propaganda, , , , Information Vertigo, , Ivan Segal, Legacy Media, Ossetia, , Tibet   

    Citizen Propaganda in Contemporary Conflicts: The Case of Israel-Gaza, Russia-Georgia and China-Tibet 

    The absence of reliable and unbiased information about the Israel-Gaza conflict is eerily reminiscent of the information vacuum during the Russia-Georgia Ossetia war (Wikipedia/ Global Voices).

    There are many parallels between the two conflicts.

    There’s a war between a more powerful country (Russia and Israel) and its weaker neighbor (Georgia and Palestine). The weaker country not only suffers a military defeat, but its communications infrastructure is also hacked (Noah Shachtman and Travis Wentworth). The stronger country denies access to international journalists. That, combined with the absence of a vibrant media ecosystem in the attacked country (Georgia and Palestine), leads to an information vacuum. The bias of the American media towards one of the involved countries (Georgia and Israel) further adds to the confusion.

    Due to limited access and the absence of prior reputations, citizen journalists in the attacked countries cannot make their voices heard. And, finally, whatever citizen reporting does come out of the conflict zone can be best characterized as citizen propaganda, designed to add further fuel to the blame game. Ethan Zuckerman points out in the comments that the citizen propaganda in these conflicts even extends to citizen participation in coordinated cyber attacks against websites in the enemy country (Noah Shachtman and Evgeny Morozov).

    As a result, we aren’t even able to establish basic facts about the two conflicts. Which of the two countries was the real aggressor? What was the exact scope of citizen casualties? What is the correct point of reference to understand the conflict (Ivan Sigal)?

    I have already written about the citizen propaganda in the Israel-Gaza conflict. Today, I found myself following a trail of links on citizen propaganda in the August 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict, a trail that led me to another trail of links on Chinese citizen journalism against the Western media coverage of the March 2008 Lhasa riots (Wikipedia/ Global Voices).

    After a fact-finding trip to Georgia, Ivan Sigal talks about the phenomenon of information vertigo –

    In an environment where primary sources of information are opaque and of uncertain reliability (and perception is key here), we encounter the phenomenon of information vertigo.

    Information vertigo is the sickening feeling you get when you recognize that nothing reported can truly be verified. Mass media, ostensible eyewitness reports, images, video, documents: all blends into a mush of hearsay when root sources of information have been corrupted.

    In the absence of a sense of what to trust, we develop a frantic, aggressive assertion toward what we think we know. It is not just citizen propaganda, but an attempt to establish clear positions in a world void of facts.

    Citizen media relies on professional journalism and access to official data, as well as online mechanisms such as comments for verification. In the absence of legitimate information sources, it’s difficult to presume that citizen media could or should have filled the gaps.

    Evgeny Morozov in openDemocracy says that the absence of citizen journalism from Ossetia isn’t surprising –

    A simple truth about modern conflicts is that they tend to occur in places without universal access to internet broadband and the low ratios of iPhones per capita. It would be sublimely naive – and condescending – to expect South Ossetians or Georgians to respond to intense shellfire by taking a crash-course in podcasting, even if they did have electricity and and an internet connection. Tskhinvali and Gori were never going to be hubs of user-generated content from a war-zone.

    And yet..some “citizen reports” from Tskhinvali and Gori have emerged despite the technological challenge. This is impressive and welcome, but it comes with a further problem: trust. Most were of poor quality, and many appeared on blogs with no reputation, no previous blogging history (some had been registered only a few days before the war), and carried no identification of a real person with a real name who could claim responsibility for or ownership of them.

    In this context, the citizen reports from Gori and Tskhinvali that I had seen triggered more questions than answers.

    Onnik Krikorian’s interview of Georgian blogger Giga Paitchadze reveals some of the limitations Evgeny Morozov talks about –

    Onnik Krikorian: When the conflict with Russia started, the number of Georgian blogs soon increased. Who are these new bloggers?

    Giga Paitchadze: It’s mainly young people aged 20-30 who have constant Internet access at the offices where they work. However, it all started with email lists although a couple of days before the war started — on 5th or 6th August — some people started to set up blogs about the conflict with Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

    Dozens of new blogs about the war in different languages were set up although I can’t say all were of high quality. As for myself, all I did was collect information and post it to my blog.

    Of course, everyone looks at this conflict from only one side only and it’s very difficult to be objective so the blog entries from Georgian bloggers were always against Russia and vice-versa. There weren’t many people who tried to understand or analyze what was happening and why.

    Ethan Zuckerman thinks that the biased citizen reporting in the Russia-Georgia conflict is part of the rising phenomenon of citizen propaganda –

    Part of the reason this war is such a riddle is that we’ve entered a new phase in contemporary conflict: the world of citizen propaganda.

    The conflict in Ossetia is tailor-made for citizen propaganda. Analysts in the US – removed from the conflict both in distance and knowledge – are likely to rely on existing frames that may not represent events well or accurately. Citizens of Russia and Georgia are well aware that international opinion matters in the resolution of these events and turn to citizen media tools to make their cases. Their audiences, perceiving that professional media is biased against their interpretation, may place more credence on “eyewitness accounts” than they would if not already frustrated by mainstream accounts. Reading anything in these circumstances becomes a challenging task, navigating the stated and unstated agendas of anyone who’s speaking, discounting and revaluing all opinions based perceived biases.

    Joshua Froust at Columbia Journalism Review believes that the big American blogs were equally biased in their coverage of the conflict –

    Much of the commentary on the conflict resolved into very clear partisan lines: Russia on the Left, Georgia on the Right. Rather than providing the clarity, nuance, and honesty that they promise to provide, the big blogs instead retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners. By keeping to their usual haunts, these blogs did their readers a tremendous disservice: they were just as incurious and ideological as they regularly accuse the MSM of being.

    Julia Loffe at Columbia Journalism Review suggests that even as Russian bloggers adopted an overtly nationalistic posture, they might have been equally suspicious of Russian and Western propaganda –

    Combine a culture already suspicious of all things political with the natural, magnifying outlet of the free-for-all blogosphere, and you get Russian bloggers searching desperately for the necessarily elusive key to the riddle of this war. Obviously, the thinking goes, evidence on the ground is being manipulated for political purposes. Obviously, says the rare Georgian sympathizer, we’re only being shown the wrecked streets and not the rest of the city. Or, says the Russian nationalist, the West wants to minimize the death toll in Tskhinvali so that Saakashvili can escape the war crime charges he so desperately deserves.

    It is not, however, a question of looking for the skew-factor of media bias, as it would be in the West. In Russia, the question is more essential: What truth are they trying to hide from us?

    Ethan Zuckerman goes on to draw connections between the Russian citizen propaganda during the Otessia conflict and the Chinese citizen propaganda during the Lhasa riots –

    Russians aren’t the first to turn to YouTube to make their case for their nation’s actions. During the Lhasa riots, a number of Chinese videographers produced montages explaining their view that Tibet was an inseperable part of China, or challenging what they perceived as Western media bias in coverage of the riots. These videos were in English, intended to persuade a non-Chinese audience to either change their views or acknowledge another point of view. It’s easy to dismiss the presence of such user-generated propaganda as the result of government initiatives like the “fifty cent party” (wumaodang), a team of online commentators paid to put forth pro-Party views on the Chinese internet. But, there’s no indication that efforts like anti-cnn.com or the web videos referenced above are anything other than citizen propaganda.

    Evgeny Morozov believes that such incidents of citizen propaganda are rooted in a deep suspicion of the West in general, and Western media in particular –

    My biggest problem with Rosen’s optimism is that, when applied in the international context-where “media” are the CNNs and the BBCs of this world, and the public are the Russians and the Chinese angry with their coverage (most often because their governments told them so) – it is not at all clear what those “former audiences” have really morphed into. Rosen is correct: passive they are no more. They-and especially the young people- are all actively producing information on blogs, forums, and comment sections of the sites belonging to some of the most venerable names in the news media. But could it be that the people formerly known as the audience have become the people currently known as the information warriors?

    Ethan Zuckerman wonders why such criticism hasn’t been more widely reported in Western media –

    The problem with bridgeblogging is that it’s no good to speak if no one is listening. I’m not seeing a lot of traction for this story in Western press thus far – a search on Google News for “china media bias” yields 118 stories, several of which are from English-language publications tightly controlled by the Chinese government, while a search for “china tibet riots” yields over 16,000 recent stories.

    Some of the western media outlets picking up the bias story are doing so explicitly to debunk it.

    This is a pretty fascinating contrast to the way western media has reported on blog efforts to debunk errors in media stories. While some reporters have complained about the “pajamahadeen“, bloggers have also been lionized for their fact-checking functions. It seems slightly unfair to assume that Chinese bloggers are incapable of the same techniques of press criticism that their western counterparts have pioneered, or that Chinese bloggers can’t be genuinely upset about what they see as unfair Western critique.

    Finally, in a New Yorker story on China’s angry youth, Tang Jie, a 28 year old Chinese neo-conservative, wonders who is really brainwashed (via William Moss) –

    “Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

    There’s a very thin line between activism and propaganda, so it isn’t surprising that citizen journalism in contemporary conflicts often turns into citizen propaganda.

    The question is: if you can’t trust the official version of the story, often delivered through mainstream media, which acts as a mere messenger, and if you cannot trust the grassroots narrative, who do you trust?

    The bigger question is: in a world divided by deep pseudo-ideological fault lines (the West vs. the rest, to begin with), who decides what is objective and what isn’t?

    Cross-posted at Social Media in Business, Development, and Government.

     

    • EthanZ 5:57 pm on January 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Another possible parallel, Gaurav – in both cases, we’re seeing average citizens involved with hacking attacks, joining groups trying to deny the other side the ability to tell their story. Just posted about this at http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/01/08/install-a-trojan-for-israel-uh-no-thanks/

      “Ivan Sigal”, by the way. He’s now executive director of Global Voices… a very good development for us.

    • Gaurav Mishra 10:03 pm on January 8, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      @Ethan: Thank you to pointing to your article on the link between citizen propaganda and coordinated cyber attacks. I can’t believe I misspelled Ivan’s name. We have met once, at a conference and for drinks afterwards, and had a long chat over a walk. :-)

  • Gaurav Mishra 7:24 pm on January 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Legacy Media, Media Li, Media Savvy,   

    Question:Does Participatory Media Need Legacy Media to Break Stories into the Mainstream? 

    I’m a big believer in the power of participatory media, and believe that citizen journalism and citizen activism will play an increasingly important role in business, development and government.

    However, even for a die hard enthusiast like me, it’s almost impossible to ignore the reality that participatory news media has an interesting two way dynamics with legacy news media. Participatory news media (still) derives most of its legitimacy from legacy news media, even as it progressively hacks away at the power of legacy news media.

    Consider this. Legacy news media — newspapers, television channels, and wire agencies — are still doing most of the first hand journalistic reporting. Bloggers, at best, have taken some stories that were “under-reported” in legacy news media and amplified them, sometimes through background research, so that legacy news media is forced to pay attention to them. This is especially true of online citizen activism.

    Even in cases where bloggers have committed “acts of journalism”, and broken stories from a developing crisis scene, often in the form of photos or videos, such acts of journalism have relied on lagacy news media to reach the mainstream.

    So, whether we are talking about citizen journalism or citizen activism, participatory media is most effective when it is able to push up important stories into the legacy news media.

    That’s a theme that is common to almost every single item in this list of the biggest moments in citizen journalism.

    Working by itself, the reach and effectiveness of participatory media is severely limited, especially in a country like India where internet penetration is still in single digits.

    So, I’m suggesting that the legacy media versus participatory media debate is a waste of time. Participatory media is a potentially important source of stories for legacy media and legacy media is the most important medium for citizen journalists or citizen activists to break a story into the mainstream. As things stand today, participatory media needs legacy media more than the other way round.

    I’m also suggesting that media literacy and media savvy (and they are different things) are important skills for bloggers, and it is essential to master these skills to be effective, both in terms of identifying important stories and breaking stories into the mainstream.

    Do let me know what you think.

     

    • Rafi 1:12 pm on February 3, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Let me try to udnerstand what you’re saying: we should be viewing legacy journalism and citizen journalism as cooperative tools, not oppositional ones.

      Am I interpreting you correctly?

  • Gaurav Mishra 1:08 am on December 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Alexandros Grigoropoulos, Athens, , , Epaminondas Korkoneas, , , , Legacy Media, , Networked Anarchy, , Qik, , Smart Mob, Snap Mob, , , ,   

    Greece Riots: Smart Mob, Snap Mob, or Networked Anarchy? 

    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.

     

    • Priyanka 1:06 pm on December 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      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?

    • Gaurav Mishra 10:13 pm on January 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      @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.

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