CHIEF INSIGHT: RT @TheRebelYell – The ‘Times,’ they are a-changin’

June 29, 2009 by Jorge Labrador 

Social media are only now starting to reach their potential

Heart aflutter and soul a-twitter, I wake up every morning thinking about when and how I’ll get my next fix.

My fix of news, of course.

Information, discussion, confirmation – between Internet connectivity and the 24-hour TV news cycle, it has become increasingly easy to spend a vast chunk of your day finding out what’s going on, why it’s going on, who thinks it’s a horrible thing, who thinks it’s a great thing, what’s really going on and whether it was true in the first place or there’s more developing and finally… what else is going on. Repeat the cycle for each newsworthy story – and this can be done before you pick up the morning paper or turn on the TV.

Much news coverage has been devoted to news gathering and presenting methods of late. Microblogging site Twitter is mentioned with staggering frequency in the news, with the site practically becoming a free public relations operation for many celebrities. In fact, several UNLV departments can be found on Twitter.

Even the TV coverage of the protests against presidential election results in Iran tended to stray into talks about Twitter, as those in Tehran posted information to help each other organize and let the outside world know what was happening, despite Iran’s Internet filters – which might only be eclipsed by the so-called “Great Firewall of China.”

In the days following the first signs of unrest, Google and Facebook quickly added Persian translation tools and language options for their interfaces, easing the spread of information being posted on blogs and through profiles on social networking Web sites. Neda Agha-Soltan, a 27-year-old Iranian woman whose dying moments were captured on film, became a martyr and a symbol for the protesters, via YouTube.

None of these are the traditional press, but they have become other forms of gathering information – with increasing amounts newsworthy detail being posted onto and gleaned from them by users.

These community-based sites helped knowledge of the protests spread quickly throughout the world – and perhaps contributed to the movement (and counter-movements, of course) in the first place.

Are we all the fourth estate? Are these tools only fleetingly useful? Is “crowdsourcing” – where vast amounts of information contributors and consumers are all one and the same – how our news and research will be handled in the future? It’s certainly becoming a viable option.

Of course, crowdsourcing is a double-edged sword. When Michael Jackson’s death was first reported Friday, rumors quickly arose that actors Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor had also died in unrelated situations.

They were both fine. Goldblum was actually in New Zealand.
The stories had been generated by prank Web sites and spread the same way news of Jackson’s death and Iranian rallies had – social media.

On the plus side, these same mechanisms are self-correcting – these rumors were dispelled the same way they were started. It’s hard to not to be awed by that kind of efficiency. It used to be that an error, if committed to print, could potentially ruin someone’s life.

Do you trust news you hear about on social media sites? Do you still wait for a “trustworthy source” for verification, as many did with TMZ.com’s (ultimately accurate) report of Michael Jackson’s death? Do you contribute?

How do you get your fix? Take a day or two and track every piece of news you pick up during the day and where you first heard it. And let us know, because we’d love to find out.

You know where to look us up.

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