I think this analogy applies so well to social media. They’re tools to tell stories. like all tools they’re good for some things and rubbish for others. You wouldn’t unscrew a screw with a hammer or polish a stone with a saw.

The same’s true for social media – it’s a way to engae with a different audience demographic in a different way – in many ways it’s a new language and knowing how to speak is vital in communicating and telling stories.

As I’ve said before., the future’s in our hands and it’s our responsibility to know what to do with it.

Social Media Monkey (PowerPoint)

Kai…

Mary…

Tommy…

We mentionned in our presentation that the future is digital.. save for a massive crash of the entire world’s computer systems, I think we can assume that the influence social media has on the news will only increase.

There has already been a backlash of some news organisations abusing social networking sites such as Twitter for their own gains… cf. The Guardian – using the viral nature of the site to send links to their headlines  and Channel4 using it as a digital voxpopping site. But I think there are still ways it can be a blessing to the news industry.

Yesterday Sky announced they were to have a Twitter correspondent, @KrishGM of @channel4 pioneered the ‘twinterview’ and obviously the site has proved itself as an intenational medium

But we aren’t just talking Twitter….

With all new technologies there will always be teething issues, questions over morality and debates as to how much it will affect the day to day running of the industry.

Since September we have been drilled constantly on the importance of the internet and being adaptable in order to survive. We have been asked to set up (and maintain) blogs of our own so we can get an idea of the wealth of options open to “consumers” in this digital age. The news is no longer a “closed shop” but I don’t see that as a threat to journalism. Instead it is a way of ensuring its survival.

Whereas once the news was a lecture – you were told what the headlines and main stories were without the opportunity for discussion – it is now more like a seminar. Which then brings the news to life.

Ultimately without people you have no news, so I say bring on the “cacophony of regional accents and patois,” because I for one don’t want to live in a monolingual society.

Did a news article tickle your fancy? Digg it and you can influence the news headlines.

Have you posted photos on your Facebook profile? Then you have waived your right to privacy.

Social Media is the buzzword for 2009. I can’t open up my email and not be bombarded with blogs predicting the democratisation of media. If the technology exists, surely everyone will jump at the chance to become one of the press pack. But what is stopping those less scrupulous types from leeching all your private information off your profile pages? If you willingly put the information out into cyberspace, do you have the right of redress if it is used against you?

Well if the PCC are any sort of moral compass, it would seem that the Basingstoke Gazette was in the wrong when it used material which had been ripped directly from a teenager’s social networking profile. In a similar way that images and videos were ripped following the Virginia Tech massacres in the States, the Gazette lifted tributes and messages from his MySpace profile to suggest that he was a heavy drinker.

Social networking is a new concept, and I can see the temptation to use material which would seem to be freely available. Can we really demand privacy if we freely share information online?

Facebook made it possible for hordes of people to browse your drunken mug shots from the night before. Twitter allowed them to read a running commentary of your trips to ASDA. Now Google is providing live satellite tracking of your every move. It’s like being tagged, but you don’t even need an ASBO.

Latitude uses signals from your mobile phone to track your movements on a satellite map. The application is free and can be used on some mobile phones as well as on your PC. The service also allows you to send Twitteresque status updates to accompany your toings and froings.

Privacy

Unsurprisingly the Big Brother brigade have kicked off at what they see as a breach of personal privacy. 

Google says that the application is 100% voluntary and that you can opt out of being tracked. They also point out that you can choose your privacy settings.

You can share, set, or hide your location – or turn off Google Latitude – from the privacy menu. You can also hide your location or share only a city-level location with certain friends. [Google]

Still, it’s always a shock to realise that your every move could be tracked. And then there’s the niggling fear that Google is in fact Big Brother after all and is selling your location to the CIA.

On Monday the Ponemon Institute, a US information security watchdog, reported that Google no longer ranks among its 20 most trusted companies for security. The ranking is based on a survey of around 6,500 Americans and is purely a measure of public trust.

The Future

So is satellite tracking the future of social media? Eric Zeman of Information Week thinks so. He points out that it was mobile phone companies who developed the idea and as more and more mobiles are fitted with GPS chips, tracking seems inevitable.

Of course there will be many who love the idea. Parents who want to keep an eye on their little ones, for example. Personally the only thing that would make me want to sign up is to track down the scally who pinched my phone.

That said we have 2 weeks to create an amazing presentation and sell it to the rest of the group, so I might wait a fortnight before I crawl under a rock and unsubscribe from all the feeds which are currently cluttering up my inbox!

So Charlotte has said that we have to tighten the angle of our research to answer the question she set us – how is news being affected by social media or something like that. I know Tommy has had a good idea of producing a graphic depicting how the way news is told has changed over the years, but is this the only angle we are exploring?

In his post MySpace and Facebook are creating a youth culture of digital narcissism, Kai flagged up the BBC World Service’s Digital Planet podcast. Along with Andrew Keen, they also talked about the ‘news aggregator’ site, Digg.

Digg, if you haven’t heard of it before, is basically a social bookmarking site which specialises in news stories. The idea is that when you read a news story that you like you ‘digg it’ which then pushes it up the running order. The most popular stories appear on the front page and the least popular are buried. What makes it interesting is the way the most popular stories differ from those appearing on the front pages of the traditional press. In a way it goes back to the whole Madeleine McCann / Sky issue and also relates to what Paul said about the readers of his newspaper.

Similarly, the @alltweetjournal has been set up to allow those who tweet regularly to ‘share their news with a wider audience,’

Presentation minded…

This might take a little organisation but I was basically thinking we could produce a short video – like a 90 seconds rolling news bulletin or something similar – containing only the news stories that Digg or this new Twitter paper have covered. In other words, producing a purely social media generated news bully. We could ask Denis if we can use the virtual reality studio or maybe do a quick pre-rec once Live@5 has been transmitted?

What do you think?

On a completely unrelated note, @gabizago flagged up this article, which basically states that ‘Twitter journalism’ isn’t going to change anything. Whilst it is really interesting, it is, unfortunately, in Portuguese (and the Brazilian variant at that) so it is taking a little while to translate. Nonetheless, I think the basic gist is covered in the first few paragraphs, which I have translated for you here. [While I'm at home and reunited with my dictionary, I'll try and paraphrase the rest - it's a little long for an exact translation!] I really would suggest that you read it since it’s an opposing view to what we have previously been discussing.

On the flip side, I noticed that @channel4 were using Twitter to generate UGC and comments about #uksnow. (Using Web 2.0 to reach the general viewing public rather than put on hat and go out into the snowy streets and find them themselves.) Journalism.co.uk has written an impassioned piece explaining why Twitter is not a lazy alternative to voxpops.  It’s as you said Tommy, rather than relying on a computer, it is always preferable to ring someone up or talk to them face to face!

I know I mentioned that I was writing a piece on the complaint about journalists lifting photos/ videos off MySpace etc which was upheld by the PCC. At the moment that has gone on hold -  it got really complicated, but I’ll try and get something together before next week… or anyone else can steal the idea if you fancy it! (Search through my del.icio.us links for the relevant articles. The privacy issue is also mentioned in the journalism.co.uk article mentioned above.)

See you when I get back to the Fal, and sorry for missing our meeting this morning (doubly sorry since I was the one who asked for it!)

This started just as a comment but was getting a bit messy, so I thought I’d tidy it up and submit it properly, but really it’s more of a comment plus – to Mary’s Music, Marketing and Web 2.0

I just stumbled across this blog, these guys did a bit of Twitter research during the Superbowl last night. They monitered the number of Tweets following arange of different brands adverts and have done some nifty little graphs and decided on a winner (although their criteria are not so clear to me).

Apart from the interest in which commercials are generating any WOM (word of mouth) I thought the idea of measuring it in this way was pretty interesting, and was half wondering if it would be worth keeping an eye on Twitter after our presentation to see how good we are at generating any WOM ourselves? Might be worth investing in some form of chocolate bribery for the most Tweets about social media post presentation? (or we could give Jules the choc upfront?)

Word of Mouth

On the WOM side have any of you heard of bzzagent? I think it’s a bit like social media trying to keep it real and stay in the real world. You don’t connect to other people but to products. They send you out freebies and you spread the word in person or over the internet, and provide feedback on how you find the product and peoples reaction to it. I’s almost like a real world viral I guess.

I know I’ve seen adverts of facebook for similar schemes and was wondering if anyone else had come across the idea in their own wonderings? I’m sure they must be out there but I’ve never come across any similar schemes for websites…so how do they generate WOM – how do we find new websites and start using them? I only know about Twitter through the course and friends chased me on to facebook when people started to travel abroad and wanted to keep up. But is it really all done through search engines? It seems a bit messy to my thinking – anyone have a clue?  

Of course I’m pretty sure that the live feed mixup got the most traffic in any case – now this is advertising!

“It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break; the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours.

“It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.”

These are examples of humanity’s essence shining through: the willingness to embrace each other, no matter what.

In the days leading up to the inauguration, the Huffington Post published this article to try and make people connect, not with a computer screen, but with each other, to share the warm greeting of hello, a smile, a hug.

Social media has its benefits. Global information can be shared at break-neck speeds, it gives people a voice and it makes people feel ‘connected’ to a greater ‘whole.’

But there’s an inherent danger within social media. And it’s a danger that extends to all spheres of society.

Hyper-Reality 

Let’s look at a recent news event. Earlier this month a US Airways Airbus A320 crashed into the Hudson River in New York.

No one was hurt, the pilot was hailed as a hero, he even double checked the plane to make sure everyone was out and everyone was ok.

But since then media junkies have been quick to heap praise on Twitter for breaking the news and immediately having photos of the event. It creates a simulation of immediacy and connectivity but this virtual simulation is false.

The crash becomes a pseudo-event, a phrase coined  by American Daniel Boorstin in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, published in 1961.

Psuedo-events become the starting point for postmodernism and hyper-reality. And social media is a catalyst that leads us further and further away from humanity.

And in news terms, it’s people that make stories, not computer programs.

Jean Baudrillard

In his book The Transparency of Evil the late French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard , examines the postmodern world and how, essentially, we have already been swallowed by the hyper-real.

On the subject of interactivity, in his essay Xerox and Infinity, Baudrillard says:

“We lived once in a world where the realm of the imaginary was governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation.

 

“Nothing inscribed on these screens is ever intended to be deciphered in any depth: rather, it is supposed to be explored instantaneously, in an abreaction immediate to meaning, a short-circuiting of the poles of representation.”

 

“Today that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks.

 

“All our machines are screens, and the interactivity of humans has been replaced by the interactivity of screens.

 

I feel like a hypocrite writing this because I’m using the machine, the screen, the network to publish my own thoughts.

But if the means justify the end than I can cope with that.

Keep it real 

And the end is this…

It’s dawn. The sky, the air, the world, hum with electric blue. The sun is yet to rise. I sit on rocks and watch the sea.

I hear the waves crash, feel flecks of sea spray wet against my face, breathe deeply, let the cool air fill my lungs.

Somewhere inside me a voice says, “Share it. Photograph it, film it, Tweet it, Facebook it, Skype it.”

But by doing this, by trying to replicate the scene, feelings and emotion, I would destroy the magic. 

The reproduction would be false. The image a shallow representation of reality.

And this need to capture a moment is become increasingly prevalent, particularly the incessant desire to constantly take photos in order to post them on Facebook.

By just sitting, watching and living that dawn it becomes something specific to me and I, in turn, become specific to it.

In taking a step back, I give myself time to breathe, time to listen and time to enjoy being part of the world’s turning – a connection far greater and more powerful than any a machine could give.

In writing this, I’m reminded of a song by The National, a heroic band in every sense of the world.

It’s called Fake Empire, the chorus: “We’re half awake in this fake empire…”

Have a listen…