Crossing Gaps

Clay Shirky on the shift in the media la...

Quang Tran 1:52 am on June 16, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
Tags: Big ideas (2), Big thinkers (3), Clay Shirky (3), Connections, Disruptive technology (2), Ideas Project, Information space, media landscape, New website, social media (12), Thought leaders (3), Video interview

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  Quang Tran 1:54 am on June 16, 2009 Permalink
  

  Transcript (via Ideas Project)

  Social Media Enhances the Emotional Dimension of News

  In the media environment we’re used to, production of media, whether it’s books, or television, or whatever, has targeted individuals who have sort of long term consumption and long term reactions. We’re increasingly moving to a media environment where we’re targeting groups who have short term consumption and short term reactions, “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh, look at this!” That is swinging the role of emotion into a much more central position in the media environment.

  What we’re seeing now, with Facebook streams, with Twitter, with the move towards instantaneous ability to pick up on a signal, modify it slightly, share it with my friends who pick up on what I’m adding to it, modify it slightly, and share it with their friends, in a matter of minutes, is that emotionally engaging messages are now rippling around the world at nearly the speed of light.

  We Tend to Share Things that Increase our Social Capital
  The media landscape is now going to balance increasingly towards the sharing of the things that create social capital among people. Whether or not that’s good or bad, as you say, it’s a value judgment and it’s early days. What it does suggest to me though is that we need, at some point, to think about what the countervailing mechanism is to dampen panics, so that we maintain, where we need it, a sort of a heightened level, “Oh this is going on, you should know,” but not what’s kind of happened with the Swine Flu over the last couple of days, which is going from nothing to this kind of collective, global, “Ahhh!”

  People are already making fun of that on Twitter. It may be that society itself starts putting those dampers on. Figuring out, essentially, how to balance the long form and reflect it with the short form and emotional. That is not a six month challenge; that’s really a big shift in the media landscape, and there is going to be lots and lots of experimental responses to that. It’s going to take a while before we get it right.

  Human Society has Become the Conduit for Media
  We’ve been used to the idea that the fuller the experience, the print to radio to television to movies, the more emotionally immersed you get in the moment. But Twitter, which went the opposite way - text only 140 characters, or the Facebook feed; just a handful of little status updates - those are actually things where, because they’re coming from our friends, the emotion is already pre-existing in the relationship and it takes very little to trigger it in a channel.

  What’s happening is the media is now not operating this parallel broadcast universe to regular human society; it’s increasingly using the channels of human society to flow, which means that channels along which emotion already flows are increasingly the way that these new stories - the Swine Flu and Amazon fails of the world - start to break.

  Gossip has Become a Channel for Information
  The question of how we get information and how we attach authority to it is a really complicated one now. If you only gossip with your friends and your entire worldview came from that - which is to say roughly the state of the world prior to 1500 - you would have as narrow a worldview as you would expect in a situation like that. One of the surprising things that’s happening in these friends of friends networks is, that like bees carrying pollen, when we’re talking to each other, we’re also saying, “Oh my God, you have to read this; oh, I just saw that thing,” and so we’re now not just gossiping, gossip has become a media channel for external links.

  The risk of that, however, is back to the emotional risk, which is if something comes from my friend I’m inclined to trust it, not even necessarily because I trust my friend, or not even necessarily because I think my friend has the kind of judgment that means that they’ve vetted it, but rather because I just have positive emotional feelings. If they say, “Oh my goodness, look at this! This corporation is mulching their yard with ground up baby kittens! I’m outraged! I hate people who grind up baby kittens,” and I’m forward the thing along. No one has gone and checked whether the mulching is happening.

  Appropriate Ways to Negotiate the Social Network
  I think a lot of what we’re going to move towards is the page rank-icization of everything. Google, when they looked at the search problem, said, “Yahoo is broken because they’re trying to infer all the value from the page itself, and not looking at who is linking to it and who is doing the linking of the people doing the linking,” and so forth. It’s the same problem with spam; it’s the same problem with these other kinds of things, which is, “I don’t want anybody in the world to be able to contact me, but I do want people I don’t know to be able to contact me.”

  Being able to find metrics through the social network that says, “You’ve never met this person, and you’ll probably be happy to get their mail.” Like, “Ten people you know, know a hundred people that person knows.” That’s a person I want to hear from. That kind of use of the social graph, as a way to let certain kinds of messages in, certain kinds of messages out, and possibly, later down the road, flag certain kinds of messages as, “This has been forwarded at such a rapid rate that it may be that no one has done any fact checking.”

  You could almost, on Twitter, write a metric that tied velocity to an inverse likelihood that anybody had done any deep looking, and just flag those things and have somebody say, “I’m going to grab these top ten hash tags and I’m just going to start doing the research,” and set up your own kind of - those are the sort of pushback mechanisms that may keep us more globally aware, which could be useful in an increasingly globalized environment, without being just panic-stricken little nervous little dogs.

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