Mediactive Read online

  Media-creation skills are becoming part of the educational process for many children in the developed world (less so for other children). In the U.S. and other economically advanced nations, teenagers and younger children are what some call “digital natives,” though some of the most savvy users of digital technology are older people who have learned how to use it and who bring other, crucial skills—most notably critical thinking and an appreciation of nuance—to the table.

  Young or old, learning how to snap a photo with a mobile phone is useful, but it’s just as important to know all the possibilities of what you can do with that picture and to understand how it fits into a larger media ecosystem.

  Also, it’s essential to grasp the ways people use media to persuade and manipulate—that is, how media creators push our logical and emotional buttons. Understanding this also means knowing how to distinguish a marketer from a journalist, and a non-journalistic blogger from one whose work does serve a journalistic purpose; all create media, but they have different goals.

  All this is part of the broader grasp of how journalism works. The craft and business are evolving, but they still exert an enormous influence over the way people live. In one sense, some journalists are an example of a second-order effect of the marketers’ trade, because sellers and persuaders do all they can to use journalists to amplify their messages.

  Happily, as the mediasphere becomes ever more diverse, it is unleashing forces that ensure greater scrutiny of journalism. This helps us become more mediactive.

  Media criticism was a somewhat sleepy field until bloggers came along, with only a few publications and scholarly journals serving as the only serious watchdogs of a press that had become complacent and arrogant. Journalists themselves rarely covered each other, except in the way they covered celebrities of all kinds. This wasn’t a conspiracy of silence, but it was taken as given that only the most egregious behavior (or undeniable triumphs) were worthy of note in competitive journals or broadcasts.

  Thankfully, bloggers, in particular, have become ardent examples of the new breed of media critics. Some are small-time jerks, dogs chasing cars because it’s their instinct to do so. But many are the real thing: serious, impassioned critics who deserve respect for performing the watchdog role so important to the rest of us.

  We all need to help each other sort out the information we can trust from that we shouldn’t. This will be complicated, but if we get it right, the value will be immeasurable.

  Toward a Slower News Culture

  On Nov. 5, 2009, in the minutes and hours after an Army officer opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, the media floodgates opened in the now-standard way. A torrent of news reports and commentary poured from the scene, the immediate community and the Pentagon, amplified by corollary data, informed commentary and rank speculation from journalists, bloggers, podcasters, Tweeters, texters and more.

  Also standard in this age of fast news was the quality of the early information: utterly unreliable and mostly wrong. The shooter was dead; no he wasn’t. There were two accomplices; no there weren’t. And so on.

  Several critics tore into a soldier who was using Twitter, a service noted for rumors, to post about what she was seeing. Indeed, some of what the soldier posted turned out to be wrong. But was it fair to extrapolate this to brand all forms of citizen media as untrustworthy and voyeuristic?

  There was plenty of wrong information going around that day, at all levels of media. Lots of people quoted President Obama’s admonition to wait for the facts, but almost no one followed it. And almost no one heeded Army Gen. George William Casey Jr.’s advice the following Sunday not to jump to conclusions “based on little snippets of information that come out.”

  Greg Marx at the Columbia Journalism Review was among several commentators to catalog some of the misinformation that raced around. He wrote:

  It’s not fair to lay too much of this confusion at the feet of [traditional media] reporters, who are mostly diligent and conscientious, who are basing their claims in good faith on what they are hearing from their sources, and who are under tremendous competitive pressure to get the story first. But on a story like this, tendencies toward error, exaggeration, and inconsistency are built into the system, at least in the first days of reporting. In due time, a clearer picture will begin to emerge; in this case, we’ll even hear from the shooter himself.

  There will be plenty of time for analysis. Until then, let’s all take a deep breath.

  Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the category of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the sooner after the actual event the information appears, the more I assume it’s unreliable, if not false.

  Still, I’m no different from everyone else in a key respect: When it comes to important (or sometimes trivial but interesting) breaking news, I, too, can react in almost Pavlovian ways from time to time, clicking the Refresh button on the browser again and again. I don’t tend to immediately email my friends and family or tweet about unconfirmed reports, though, and if I do pass along interesting tidbits I always make it a point to add “if true” to the might-be-news.

  What is it about breaking news that causes us to turn off our logical brains? Why do we turn on the TV or click-click-click Refresh or scan the Twitter feeds to get the very latest details—especially when we learn, again and again, that the early news is so frequently wrong?

  Ethan Zuckerman, a friend and colleague at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has some ideas:

  • The media make us do it. [As noted below, I give a lot of credence to this one.]

  • We’re bored.

  • Knowing the latest, even if it’s wrong, helps build social capital in conversations.

  • We’re junkies for narrative, and we always hope that we’ll get the fabled “rest of the story” by clicking one more time.

  “I suspect there’s some truth to each of those explanations, and I suspect that each is badly incomplete,” Ethan says. “I also suspect that figuring out what drives our patterns of news consumption, and our susceptibility to fast, often-wrong news is critical” for having a sounder grasp of what we can trust.

  Remember: Big breaking stories are literally exciting. They’re often about death or the threat of death, or they otherwise create anxiety. Neurological research shows that the more of your personal bandwidth anxiety takes up, the less clearly you think. To get even more neurological: The amygdala takes over from the prefrontal cortex.

  Slowing the News

  A wonderful trend has emerged in the culinary world, called the “slow food movement”—a rebellion against fast food and all the ecological and nutritional damage it causes.

  As Ethan suggested to me at a Berkman Center retreat in late 2009, we need a “slow news” equivalent. Slow news is all about taking a deep breath.

  One of society’s recently adopted clichés is the “24-hour news cycle”—a recognition that, for people who consume and create news via digital systems, the newspaper-a-day version of journalism has passed into history. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff. (Happily, a few newspapers and magazines do continue to provide actual perspective and nuance.)

  That 24-hour news cycle itself needs further adjustment, though. Even an hourly news cycle is too long; in an era of live-TV police chases, Twitter and twitchy audiences, the latest can come at any minute. Call it the 1,440-minute news cycle.

  Rapid-fire news is about speed, and being speedy serves two main purposes for the provider. The first is gratification of the desire to be first. Humans are competitive, and in journalism newsrooms, scoops are a coin of the realm.

  The second imperative is attracting an audience. Being first draws
a crowd, and crowds can be turned into influence, money, or both. Witness cable news channels’ desperate hunt for “the latest” when big events are under way, even though the latest is so often the rankest garbage.

  The urge to be first applies not just to those disseminating the raw information (which, remember, is often wrong) that’s the basis for breaking news. It’s also the case, for example, for the blogger who offers up the first sensible-sounding commentary that puts the “news” into perspective. The winners in the online commentary derby—which is just as competitive, though played for lower financial stakes—are the quick and deft writers who tell us what it all means. That they’re often basing their perspectives on falsehoods and inaccuracies seems to matter less than that they’re early to comment.

  I’m not battling human nature. We all want to know what’s going on, and the bigger the calamity is, the more we want to know—especially if it may affect us directly (if a hurricane is approaching, the latest news is not just interesting but potentially life-saving). Nothing is going to change that, and nothing should.

  Nor is this a new phenomenon. Speculation has passed for journalism in all media eras. Every commercial plane crash, for example, is followed by days of brazen hypothesizing by so-called experts, but now we are fed their ideas at hourly (or briefer) intervals, rather than only on the evening news or in the daily paper—and even that frequency was too much. Only months of actual investigation by the real experts—and sometimes not even that—will reveal the real truth, but we are nevertheless subjected to endless new theories and rehashings of the “facts.”

  The New News Cycle

  The advent of the 1,440-minute news cycle (or should we call it the 86,400-second news cycle?), which has fed our apparently insatiable appetite for something new to talk about, should literally give us pause. Again and again, we’ve seen that initial assumptions can be grossly untrustworthy.

  Consider, for example, the Fort Hood shootings. We learned that the perpetrator wasn’t killed during his rampage, contrary to what was initially reported. And that fact stayed with us because the story was still fresh enough, and the saturation coverage was ongoing, when reports emerged that he hadn’t been shot dead by law enforcement.

  However, we all also “know” false things that were inaccurately reported and then later disproved, in part because journalists typically don’t report final outcomes with the same passion and prominence that they report the initial news. We’ve all seen videos of dramatic arrests of people who were later acquitted, but still had their reputations shattered thanks to the inherent bias in crime reporting. And how many of us have heard a report that such-and-such product or behavior has been found to raise the risk of cancer, but never heard the follow-up that said the initial report was either inaccurate or misleading?

  The abundance of wrong information in the rapid-fire news system has other causes than simple speed, including the decline of what’s supposed to be a staple of journalism: fact checking before running with a story.

  As Clay Shirky (who contributed this book’s foreword) has observed—in a Twitter tweet, no less—“fact-checking is way down, and after-the-fact checking is way WAY up.”

  Clay’s point lends weight to the argument for slow news; to the idea that we all might be wise to think before we react. That is what many of us failed to do during the early hours and days of the “#amazonfail” event of April 2009. As Clay described it afterwards:

  After an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes lost their Amazon sales rank, and therefore their visibility in certain Amazon list and search functions, we participated in a public campaign, largely coordinated via the Twitter keyword #amazonfail (a form of labeling called a hashtag) because of a perceived injustice at the hands of that company, an injustice that didn’t actually occur.

  Like Clay, I came to believe that Amazon hadn’t deliberately made a political decision to reduce the visibility of these books; it was, the company said (as part of an inept PR handling of the situation), a programming error. But I was one of the people who flamed Amazon (in which I own a small amount of stock) before I knew the full story. I hope I learned a lesson.

  I rely in large part on gut instincts when I make big decisions, but my gut only gives me good advice when I’ve immersed myself in the facts about things that are important. This suggests not just being skeptical—the first of the principles I hope you’ll embrace—but also waiting for persuasive evidence before deciding what’s true and what’s not.

  It comes down to this: As news accelerates faster and faster, you should be slower to believe what you hear, and you should look harder for the coverage that pulls together the most facts with the most clarity about what’s known and what’s speculation. Wikipedia, that sometimes maligned mega-encyclopedia, can be a terrific place to start; more on that in the next chapter.

  Can we persuade ourselves to take a deep breath, slow down and dig deeper as a normal part of our media use, and to deploy the other principles of media consumption to figure out what we can trust and what we can’t? We can. And if we want to have any reason to trust what we read (hear, etc.), we’d better.

  Chapter 3

  Tools and Techniques for the Mediactive Consumer

  Now that we’ve considered some principles, let’s get practical and put those principles into practice. The key is going deeper into the news, leveraging your skepticism and curiosity and common sense toward that moment when you can say to yourself, “Ah, I get it.”

  What’s involved? Mostly an adventurous spirit; remember, this is about exploration.

  Among other things, you need to:

  • Find trustworthy sources of information.

  • Vet sources you don’t already have reason to trust.

  • Join the conversation(s).

  As always in this book, what follows is far from comprehensive. Rather, it’s a surface-level look at an almost infinitely wide and deep topic. Look for many more specifics and examples at the Mediactive website.

  Finding the Good Stuff

  At first glance, my daily media routine may sound time-consuming: I look at a few news-organization websites, including the home pages traditional enterprises such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, clicking through to articles of particular interest. I periodically glance at headlines in Google Reader and similar services, which collect links from a variety of sources, traditional and new, and are related to a variety of places and topics I’ve designated. I scan my email for items—articles, blog posts, videos, data and the like—that friends or colleagues might have flagged. I keep an eye on several Twitter lists, and I check to see what a few Facebook friends are discussing. If there’s breaking news I care about, I check back with sites I consider authoritative or at least reliable.

  Actually, all of that doesn’t take too long. I used to spend more time reading a couple of newspapers each morning and watching the news in the evening. But I’m vastly better informed now.

  I don’t believe everything I read or hear, because I apply the principles in Chapter 2. And when I need to be absolutely sure about something, I dig deeper.

  Given the relatively short time that we’ve been living in a digital-media world, it’s common wisdom to say we’re in the earliest days of figuring out how to sort through the flood of information that pours over us each day, hour, minute. But we already have many ways to be better informed.

  I use a variety of tools and methods each day, applying the principles outlined in Chapter 2 through a variety of filters and tactics. But the main tools I use are my brain and my instincts.

  The most essential filters are people and institutions I’ve come to trust. In the days of overwhelmingly dominant mass media, we had little option but to put some trust in those sources. We soon learned that they were deeply flawed institutions that, all too often, led us grossly astray or failed to address vital matters, global to local. But they also did, and continue to
do (though less and less these days), some of the most important journalism. They’d have held more trust if they’d been less arrogant and more transparent. But there’s real value, even now, in understanding what a bunch of journalists, including editors, believe is the most important news today in their own communities.

  Aggregation—someone else’s collection of items that you might find interesting—has become an absolutely essential filter. There’s computer-assisted aggregation and human aggregation, in various combinations. Let’s look at a few of them.

  Google News, relentlessly machine-based, isn’t bad as a zeitgeist of what journalists around the world believe is important (or was important in the past 24 hours or so), but Google’s almost religious belief in the power of computer to displace humans has detracted from the service’s usefulness.

  Yahoo! once was the undisputed leader in aggregation, because it understood the value of human beings in this process better than others in its arena. It’s still reasonably good, but it’s slipping.

  Topic-specific aggregation is rising in importance and quality. For example, I’m a fan of TechMeme for aggregating what’s hot in the tech world, in part because Gabe Rivera, its founder, has clearly seen a vital role for human input in the form of an editor. (And while every media junkie has been reading the Romenesko blog for years, MediaGazer, a TechMeme site, is moving up fast as a must-follow service.)