nat.will.natter

[natwillnatter]

Crime-fighting crowds?

After thinking for a while about crowd-sourcing for my last post, it was intriguing to see the FBI requesting images and videos from members of the public in regard to the Boston Marathon bombings.

Of course, it's been routine practice for years for police to release images or artist's impressions of those who have committed crimes and ask for the public to help to identify perpetrators, but this is the first time I've heard of the roles being reversed and the public uploading photos so that the police can identify them. One of the forensic analysts apparently told CNN that "there's no standard in law enforcement to acquire video from the public in the wake of a tragedy" such as last week's.

Partly, this is because of the nature of the Boston Marathon event, where people were capturing still images and video footage, meaning that there has been an extraordinary volume of photographic evidence from members of the public.

Crowd-funding has also become part of story of the Boston Marathon bombings, with hundreds of thousands of dollars pouring in online to pay for the medical treatment of a victim who helped police to identify one of the bombers.

But the negative side of crowd-sourcing has also been demonstrated over the last week, which several headlines such as "Boston bombing identification attempts on social media end in farce", "Boston bombing: How internet detectives got it very wrong", "Boston Marathon bombings: How Twitter and Reddit got it wrong", and "Reddit's Boston marathon speculation shows the limits of crowdsourcing". The reason for these headlines was that a number of wrong people were identified by the public as responsible for the bombings, leading to two teenagers appearing on the front page of the New York Post and their family fearing for their safety!

This indicates the potential for huge harm that can be caused by crowd-sourcing when the public gets it wrong, and demonstrates its limits. Nevertheless, it clearly possesses an equal amount of potential for good. The gains and ills of crime-fighting via crowd-sourcing are certainly up for debate at the moment and, whatever you conclude, there's little doubt its role will become increasingly prominent in identifying criminals in the future.

[natwillnatter]

Here comes everybody...?

I finished one of my earlier posts with reference to Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody, as we'd looked at the millions of views of the Kony 2012 campaign and touched on the media's increasing reliance on user-generated content. We have become key: ordinary people in our multitudes who are the online users, Facebook 'likers', retweeters, YouTube viewers and more.

When it comes to news, certainly, we are now equipped to make the transition from consumers to commentators to creators. But a much more important – even life-saving – aspect of the internet is the ability for users to contribute information in the event of emergency situations. The example of this form of crowd-sourcing we discussed in class was the Katrina PeopleFinder, which involved thousands of volunteers collating and entering data on people affected by Hurricane Katrina.

A potential danger, when it comes to information being supplied in this way, is the ease with which accidental or even deliberate misinformation can quickly be passed off as fact. There are numerous stories of this sort of thing happening online in general, including fake news of celebrity deaths (in the case of Jeff Goldblum, Australian Channel 9 News ran the story, believing it to be true).

So in class we discussed what distinguishes crowd-sourcing from any old collection of information on the web, concluding that verification is the key to legitimisation. For example, if we were crowd-sourcing informaton we would expect multiple, unconnected sources before we would consider something to be a fact; we would also expect to be able to check details against information from mainstream sources such as journalists and embassies; plus, where relevant, we would expect visual proof to be supplied.

So far so good, but when we turned to testing out the practicalities by setting up our own Crowdmap, I found it fairly difficult to work with, prompting me to comment to Dan: "I would never use this!" Helpfully, Dan reminded me that though it might take painstaking trial and error, attention to detail and patience to set up a Crowdmap, it's actually fairly user-friendly if you're using it to respond in a crisis situation.

This prompted me to think about when I might have wanted to make use of this kind of crowd-sourcing, and what came immediately to mind for me was September 11, 2001: at the time, I was living in Beijing and, despite working for the large State-run, English-language China Daily, reliable information was very hard to come by. Certain newspaper-affiliated websites were blocked, including the BBC and CNN, at the time, and the only reliable news source available online – The Guardian – was crashing under the weight of people rushing to find out what was going on.

So, 5,000 miles from home and almost 7,000 miles from the awful events of September 11, I was reliant on unverifiable information from unverifiable sources whose information ranged from numerous buildings falling down in New York to 10 planes on their way to attack London, where most of my friends were living at the time.

Apparently, in the aftermath of September 11 there were a number of websites gathering information about people affected, but had a more developed form of crowd-sourcing existed at the time – and had I known about it! – I imagine it would have been tremendously useful and potentially calming.

For me, one of the greatest things about the internet is its power to bring people together around a common cause and, while my previous posts demonstrate that this doesn't always work with political campaigns, where it really does seem to work is in terms of unifying communities.

So, we've seen it here through the Katrina PeopleFinder, but another fantastic example is the HopeMob crowdfunding platform. On a smaller scale, the online community enables a six-year-old boy to take his fundraising efforts from £7.22 to £5,624, and a nine-year-old girl's campaign to soar from attempting to raise £7,000 to ending up with £130,000 and rising!

Heart-warming? Yes. But more importantly, life-changing and community-transforming. Here comes everybody, using the internet in this way? Excellent. :)

[natwillnatter]

Developing and delivering an 'Ignite presentation' for my Social Media Campaigning class was really enjoyable. My competitive nature likes the fact that you have to race against your slides, which automatically advance every 15 seconds, and that you have to get to the point because you have only 5 minutes. I'd never heard of Ignite presentations prior to this, and the pressure was definitely on us as the first group to deliver our presentation!

With 4 of us taking part, we each had only 75 seconds! This was extremely useful in helping us to refine and hone down the points we wanted to make, but as the person going first I felt the extra pressure of needing to ensure I didn't run over and steal my co-presenters' precious seconds!

Our subject was the Arab Spring and, as I was going first, I needed to establish the topic and lead onto the following points. I decided, in consultation with my group, that exploring the so-called 'liberation technology' and user-generated content (UGC), would be a good way to start. My part of the presentaton went like this:

SLIDE 1 (top 2 images): To spread information widely, in the past you had to overcome issues of money (£20million to set up a newspaper), distance (how to spread info across the world) and time (broadcast slots and publication dates). The internet has overcome these three issues – now all you need is an internet connection and a mobile phone.

The information for the first slide came from previous reading of Natalie Fenton's New Media, Old News (2010) and James Curran's Media and Power (2002)

SLIDE 2: Larry Diamond describes the internet and social media as “liberation technology”, enabling citizens to monitor and scrutinise governments, expose wrong-doing, express their opinions, expand their horizons, mobilise politically, get involved and participate, and, crucially, even to report the news.

SLIDE 3: Mainstream media are increasingly reliant on ‘citizen journalists’ who, armed with smart-phones, laptops and cheap internet access are able to create and generate the news themselves.

SLIDE 4: This is particularly evident in the case of the Arab Spring, where direct access to unfolding events was often denied or impeded. Forces items onto agenda; forces politicians to comment or to toughen their stance – for example, Obama after videos went viral of women beaten and killed in the streets of Iran and Egypt.

SLIDE 5: Interestingly, in 74% of cases when the BBC broadcast UGC of the Arab Spring, no caveat was mentioned in relation to the content, so there is a question around the reliability and representativeness of information from citizens.

I stumbled across the information for this last slide while searching for general information about UGC, and was really shocked by it. No wonder "cyber-pessimists" (Davis, 2010:101) call into question the internet's democratising power to develop a better informed citizenry! If a so-called credible news outlet such as the BBC is taking content from the masses available due to 'liberation technology', but failing to verify its authenticity and reliability, then how will we ever know what news we can trust?

[natwillnatter]

We, the journalists

I was really disappointed to miss Friday's Social Media Campaigning lecture due to the snow, but I've been looking into the 'information' aspect of social media in the Arab Spring for my group's presentation this week.

In my first post I talked about my scepticism about the effectiveness, on the ground, of social media campaigns, but what I didn't go into is how Kony 2012 forced the mainstream media to sit up, pay attention, and talk about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. In the first 106 days of 2012, there was a 330% increase in mentions of Joseph Kony across nine major news outlets compared to the entire previous year (159 mentions in the 'news' sections of the BBC, The Guardian, the Independent, The Sun, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, The Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, compared to just 37 mentions in those nine titles in 2011).

So, the Kony 2012 did succeed in setting the agenda. I wonder how many other campaigns succeed in forcing items onto the mainstream news agenda. As I've been looking into the Arab Spring, one of the significant features in terms of modern technology is user-generated content (UGC). In fact, a BBC Trust report into BBC coverage of the Arab Spring claimed: "The great new challenge of the 'Arab Spring', as a media phenomenon, has been the explosion of 'user generated content' (UGC) combined with the need to reply on this because direct access to the story is so often denied or impeded." (See here.)

What is even more interesting than citizens supplying content to the BBC (mostly from mobile phones) is the fact that the Trust's report discovered that an astonishing 74% of it was broadcast with no comment or caveat about its authenticity or representativeness. (See here.)

So, modern technology and social media give us the power to set the agenda and to make the news. As Clay Shirky puts it: "Here comes everybody!"

[natwillnatter]

So, all US Senators are now on Twitter...

[natwillnatter]

Just love this. So funny, because it's so true...

[natwillnatter]

Last week I started a Social Media Campaigning class as part of my MA in Political Communications at Goldsmiths, London. I'm not sure whether I should admit this - especially not publicly, where my tutor can read this - but I'm coming into the class as a bit of a sceptic...

It seems fairly obvious that some social media campaigns achieve a great deal of success if we're measuring by hits, views or retweets, but I think it's still far from obvious that they actually meaningfully change things on the ground. (Y'know, that old physical place we now call 'offline'.)

Fuelling my scepticism is, among other things, a case study I've mentioned in a couple of essays: Kony 2012. Cyberspace went nuts for the Kony campaign video in its first few days after release - 100 million views in less than a week! And it's not so much the criticism that followed hot on its heels that interests me, but the fact that it didn't translate into offline activism...

My understanding is that the campaign objectives were to make two things happen so that the US Government and the international community would have to react: the first goal was to 'make Kony famous'; the second to see literally thousands of people pour onto the streets of cities across the world on one specific night in April to 'Cover the Night'.

The campaign succeeded in 'making Kony famous': in the US, knowledge of who Kony is went "from virtually nil to 58% of the adult population, according to one poll". But it failed to turn that knowledge and online interest into offline action - the 'Cover the Night' part of the campaign that would've demonstrated more than mere 'slactivism' on the part of its supporters attracted "sparse attendance".

Over the next few weeks, I'll post counter-arguments and examples. I may be a sceptic, but I'm hoping to have my mind changed. Actually, I want that to happen.

[natwillnatter]

A sceptic's conversion?

Last week I started a Social Media Campaigning class as part of my MA in Political Communications at Goldsmiths, London. I'm not sure whether I should admit this - especially not publicly, where my tutor can read this - but I'm coming into the class as a bit of a sceptic...

It seems fairly obvious that some social media campaigns achieve a great deal of success if we're measuring by hits, views or retweets, but I think it's still far from obvious that they actually meaningfully change things on the ground. (Y'know, that old physical place we now call 'offline'.)

Fuelling my scepticism is, among other things, a case study I've mentioned in a couple of essays: Kony 2012. Cyberspace went nuts for the Kony campaign video in its first few days after release - almost 100 million views in less than a week! And it's not so much the criticism that followed hot on its heels that interests me, but the fact that it didn't translate into offline activism...

My understanding is that the campaign objectives were to make two things happen so that the US Government and the international community would have to react: the first goal was to 'make Kony famous'; the second to see literally thousands of people pour onto the streets of cities across the world on one specific night in April to 'Cover the Night'.

The campaign succeeded in 'making Kony famous': in the US, knowledge of who Kony is went "from virtually nil to 58% of the adult population, according to one poll". But it failed to turn that knowledge and online interest into offline action - the 'Cover the Night' part of the campaign that would've demonstrated more than mere 'slactivism' on the part of its supporters attracted "sparse attendance".

Over the next few weeks, I'll post counter-arguments and examples. I may be a sceptic, but I'm hoping to have my mind changed. Actually, I want that to happen.