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?
