Mediactive Read online

  Mediactive

  By Dan Gillmor

  Copyright 2010 Dan Gillmor

  ISBN 978-0-557-78942-9

  Mediactive by Dan Gillmor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ -- or contact Creative Commons at 171 Second St, Suite 300; San Francisco, CA 94105 USA (phone +1-415-369-8480). Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://mediactive.com/cc.

  Contents

  Foreword v

  Epilogue, and Thanks 209

  Acknowledgments 214

  Foreword

  By Clay Shirky

  As print and broadcast give way to the Digital Age, the media are in upheaval. The changes have sparked fascination, confusion and peril—especially when it comes to news, which is so essential in democracies.

  We need a media environment that serves us, both as individuals and as a society. Yet turmoil in journalism threatens our ability oversee the people who act on our behalf. Media participation is critical to avoiding this threat: not just to keep politicians in check but also to balance the power of the whole crazy range of people we rely on—police and doctors and energy executives and pharmaceutical researchers and bankers, and all the other people who make decisions that affect us without requiring or allowing our direct input. Solid journalism helps keep those people working on our behalf (and it keeps us honest, when we work on behalf of others).

  The turmoil is inspiring large numbers of ideas and experiments from people who know the risks and want to help create a valuable media in this new century. The experiments fascinate me as a writer on media and the Internet, and they fascinate my students at New York University and Harvard. They differ in small and large ways, but most have at least one thing in common: They imagine trying to fix the supply of news, either by vetting or filtering sources in such a way as to preserve the old, relatively passive grazing habits of 20th century news consumers.

  Dan Gillmor, as you will see in this book, takes a very different approach. Dan doesn’t make upgrading the sources, or the gatekeepers, or the filters—or any other “them” in the media ecosystem—his only or even primary goal. Dan wants to upgrade us, so we can do our own part. He wants us to encourage media to supply better information by helping us learn to demand better information. And he wants us to participate as creators.

  Dan’s proposal for making news useful to us, as citizens and consumers, is the most ambitious one going. He wants us to become mediactive—active users of media—to help us live up to the ideal of literacy. Literacy, in any medium, means not just knowing how to read that medium, but also how to create in it, and to understand the difference between good and bad uses.

  Dan’s conception here is extraordinarily broad. Although he is a journalist, and is concerned with journalism and society, he conceives of media and our engagement with it across a broad range of behaviors, attitudes and tools we need to adopt. He offers a framework, first, for thinking of ourselves as active consumers, with the necessary virtues of skepticism and patience with complex stories, and with very practical guidelines for making judgments about the trustworthiness of stories and sources.

  His framework then extends to us as producers, offering a simple but informative guide to many of the ways that we can now make our own media and put it out in public, advising each of us to participate on the network and also to have a home base online that we control. He offers advice on making the media we create visible to the people we want to see it (today, visible means findable). And in furthering his commitment to the “active” part of being mediactive, he offers suggestions on how each of us can be a trustworthy source of information, beyond simply vetting others for trustworthiness.

  Dan’s framework includes not just individual action but group action. As more and more of our information and opinions about the world are filtered through social networks, the book sets out ideas for being a good community participant, passing along not just links but context to one another—being as good at sharing and interpreting media for one another as we are for ourselves. And it takes group action to the highest order of aggregation: what kind of society we want to be, given our access to these new tools and to their attendant freedoms.

  Dan has an extraordinary resume. He was the technology and business columnist for Silicon Valley’s hometown paper, the San Jose Mercury News, both before and during the Internet boom. He was an early blogger, and one of the first to blog as part of his newspapering duties. He wrote a book on citizen media when almost no one had heard of the idea. He’s run an academic program dedicated to treating journalism as an engaged and entrepreneurial field open to innovation, rather than a craft simply practiced by existing institutions. And he’s been a participant in various media startups, as a founder, advisor and investor.

  He’s had, in other words, a ringside seat for some of the biggest tech-inflected changes in the journalism world, as an observer, a practitioner and a theorist. He knows what a revolution looks like, he knows the long odds against any revolution actually coming to fruition, and he knows when it’s worth trying anyway, despite the long odds.

  The obvious thing to say is that most plans this audacious usually fail. A less obvious but more important thing to say is that “most” is not the same as “all”; a few plans as big as Dan’s do succeed.

  The value in trying something like this isn’t just the likelihood of success vs. failure, but that likelihood times the value created if we do indeed succeed. The possibility of making enough citizens mediactive to make journalism good because we demand that it be good, the possibility that a small but passionate group of both producers and users of journalism will become the people to do the work of holding society’s powerful to account—well, that would be something of very great value indeed.

  Of the current revolution, Dan says it’s going to be messy, but also exciting. He knows what he’s talking about. We would all do well to listen.

  Clay Shirky (shirky.com) is a researcher, teacher and author whose latest book is Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

  A Note to Readers

  In the pages that follow, you’ll see that I’ve underlined many words and phrases. These signify hyperlinks in the online and e-book versions.

  Since the entire book will be published online, this will enable you to quickly go to the Mediactive.com website and then on to the source material to which I’ve linked. I’m doing this instead of voluminous footnotes and endnotes, and for this project it feels like a better approach. (Not everything I know comes from the Internet, of course, and I’ve made clear in the text when I’m quoting from an interview or a non-online source.)

  Why this technique? As you’ll see, this project is not only the book you’re holding. It very much includes the e-book versions and online material, and the latter, in particular, goes well beyond what’s in the print edition. Think of this book as the easy-to-read, paper portion of the larger work.

  You’ll observe, meanwhile, that there’s no index. That’s also deliberate. Since the book will be online, all you have to do is a quick search. In the end, Google and other search engines are my indexes, anyway.

  Finally, if you spot a mistake, let me know. Send me email at [email protected]. If I agree it’s an error, I’ll correct it online and in the next edition; and I’ll list you as a valued friend of accuracy.

  Introduction

  It was one of those stories that grabs attention. The claim: A former U.S. Agriculture Department employee, an African-American named Shirley Sherrod, had misused her government position in racist ways. If you believed it when you first heard it, you had plenty of company—and you may
also believe you have a plausible excuse. After all, you were told by Big Media, the Obama administration and the NAACP that it was true.

  Except, as we’ve all learned since the initial media blast in July 2010, it wasn’t true. It was a brazen lie, pushed initially by Andrew Breitbart, a right-wing blogger and self-described provocateur, and his allies at Fox News and other conservative outlets. Breitbart’s blog post—which included a video snippet that gave an absolutely false impression of what Sherrod actually believed and had done—didn’t spread only because of right-wing activities, however. It was given widespread credence thanks to the cravenness of many other media organizations, President Obama’s secretary of agriculture and America’s most prominent civil rights organization—a collective fact-checking failure.

  I was lucky, in a way. I first heard about the story and Breitbart’s role in it at the same time, so I instantly had doubts. I didn’t doubt that an African-American could express racist ideas. What I doubted was that Breitbart could be taken at face value, based on his record of engaging in or assisting misrepresentations of his political adversaries’ views and activities. From my perspective, that record constitutes evidence, beyond a reasonable suspicion, that the only smart way to approach his work is to wait for absolute proof—and not trust anything he says until seeing the proof.

  Welcome to 21st century media. Welcome to the era of radically democratized and decentralized creation and distribution, where almost anyone can publish and find almost anything that others have published. Welcome to the age of information abundance.

  And welcome to the age of information confusion: For many of us, that abundance feels more like a deluge, drowning us in a torrent of data, much of whose trustworthiness we can’t easily judge. You’re hardly alone if you don’t know what you can trust anymore.

  But we aren’t helpless, either. In fact, we’ve never had more ways to sort out the good from the bad: A variety of tools and techniques are emerging from the same collision of technology and media that has created the confusion. And don’t forget the most important tools of all—your brain and curiosity.

  Many people who know me and my work may find what I just said ironic. After all, I’ve spent the past decade or more telling anyone who’d listen about the great promise of citizen media—democratized digital media tools and increasingly ubiquitous digital networks.

  Make no mistake: I believe in the potential of citizen media more than ever, partly because I’ve seen some wonderful experiments that prove out the potential.

  But the more thoughtful critics of citizen media aren’t wrong about their main point: All information isn’t equal, not in quality or reliability.

  I care, as you probably do if you’ve picked up this book, about an undeniable reality: As media become more atomized, more and more unreliable information, or worse, makes its way into what we read, listen to and watch.

  Still, I can’t contain my growing excitement about the opportunities for participation that digital media have given us. I suspect you share some of that energy, too. Whether you realize it or not, you’re almost certainly a media creator yourself to at least a tiny extent—and creative activity is intimately linked to the process of sorting out the good from the bad, the useful from the useless, the trustworthy from the untrustworthy.

  Does this sound daunting? Relax. In reality, this is a much more natural and logical—and fun—process than you might be imagining.

  At the risk of being too cute, I’ve mashed together two words—media and active—that describe my goal in this book, website and accompanying materials: I want to help you become mediactive.

  At the very least, the payoff is that you’ll be able to navigate the rapids, to better sort what you read (view, hear, etc.). If you’re like most people, you’ve been mostly a passive consumer of media, and I want to help you to become comfortable as an active user. I want to help you minimize the chances that you’ll get bamboozled, or worse, by the incorrect or misleading material that’s all over the Internet (and, all too often, in what people call “mainstream media”), and to help you find trustworthy material instead.

  When you become an active user of media, you can do much more than gain confidence that you know what you’re talking about. Millions of people already are taking it further, engaging in the emergent global conversations that help us and our communities every day. You can dabble or go as deep as you want, giving flight to your own creative and collaborative instincts. The online culture is inherently participatory and collaborative, which makes this easy. And if you own a computer you almost certainly already have the tools, or free (or close to free) access to them. The advantages of using these tools are enormous.

  Why participate in media, beyond becoming a more nuanced reader? Because your communities of geography and interest can benefit from what you know, and because being part of the deeper conversation can deliver so much satisfaction with so little effort.

  Lots of new media conversations are entirely casual, or designed to provide nothing more than simple entertainment. But when we publish information we expect others to see and possibly use—whether it’s text, video, points in a map or pretty much anything else—it’s always best to do so in honorable ways that will engender trust in what we say. That trust has to be earned.

  Please don’t think of this as a chore. We’re not talking about an “eat your (insert vegetable you loathe) because it’s good for you” exercise. We are talking about doing something that’s often fun or gratifying, and downright useful the rest of the time: useful for you, useful for all of us. But please consider this as well: In a participatory culture, none of us is fully literate unless we are creating, not just consuming.

  And please, please don’t imagine that I’m trying to turn you into a, gasp, “journalist”—a word that most people would never use to describe themselves, for lots of good reasons. I will try to persuade you, however, that if you want what you tell other people online to be trusted, it’s worth following some bedrock journalistic principles.

  There are infinite gradations of participation between sorting what you read more intelligently and being a journalist for pay; you can occupy any wavelength on that spectrum that you like at different times. Most of us will never be journalists, but any of us can—and many should—commit occasional acts of journalism, or at least contribute to what we might think of as our emerging ecosystem of knowledge and ideas.

  Whether your goal is simply to sort through the information maze or to make your mark as a media creator, or anything in between, my goal in writing this book and establishing its companion website (mediactive.com) is to help. So consider what follows here as a “user’s guide” to democratized media.

  Although I’ll offer lots of specific suggestions for being mediactive, the underlying message is more important: I hope to persuade folks to adopt some vital principles for being savvier consumers and creators alike.

  We can expand our horizons. We can expand our knowledge. Time is the one thing we can’t expand, but we can use it more effectively. Most fundamental is to rethink basic attitudes about media. That won’t take any extra minutes or hours out of your day, and it will make the time you do devote to your media more productive.

  ***

  This is an era of fast-to-market and even print-to-order production methods for physical books—that is, the versions publishers print on paper, bind between covers and ship to customers. These traditional books, which I love and still buy despite my digital habits, offer permanence and stability.

  So, it makes sense to put in this bound volume the kind of material that doesn’t change very quickly. While the tactics we might use to achieve a goal might vary from year to year, based on what tools are available, the principles don’t change much, if at all.

  Addressing the material that does evolve fast, including tools and techniques, makes much more sense on mediactive.com. For updates, especially, that’s the place to turn.

  I’m breaking the book into
three main parts. The first defines the principles and explains some of the practices you should understand to be an active consumer/user—to get the best, most useful information so you can make good life and citizenship decisions.

  The second part helps you extend that activity into the more hands-on sphere of joining the conversation in a more direct way. You’ll find that being a media creator comes naturally (probably because you’re already doing it in some ways), so the principles and practices of being a creator in a trustworthy way are also relevant here.

  The final part ranges more broadly, exploring some issues important to our lives—and to our society—that we’ll need to tackle collectively, not just as individuals. We’ll also look a bit ahead, to talk about where we’re going and what we need to get to the best possible mediactive future.

  Part I

  Darwin’s Media: The ecosystem of media and journalism is evolving rapidly, growing vastly more diverse and confusing. How did this happen? What should we do about it? It’s up to us, not just “them”—because we are the media.

  Principles of Media Consumption: We start with principles because they are the foundation: Be Skeptical; Exercise Judgment; Open Your Mind; Keep Asking Questions; and Learn Media Techniques.

  Tools and Tactics for an Active Consumer/User: Here, we look at some of the specific ways we can put the principles into practice.

  Journalism’s Evolving Ecosystem: It took a long time to get to where we are, and it’ll take time to get where we’re going. The ecosystem is becoming more diverse, and it will be more robust.

  Part II

  Principles of Media Creation: Be Thorough; Get It Right; Insist on Fairness; Think Independently; and Be Transparent.