[[course: managing doctoral research]]

On the first two days of this week I’ll be attending the managing doctoral research seminar. But hopefully I can post something sometime later this week.

Social news sites react to the ABC-debate

Social news sites were highly critical of what was seen as low-quality journalism by ABC; but it is hypothesized that this criticism was also motivated by pro-Obama sentiment.

On April 16, ABC News broadcast a televised debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderated by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. You can read the transcript of the debate here, courtesy of The New York Times.

(For those of you unfamiliar with the format, it goes on like this: the moderators ask a question, after which each candidate has a given amount of time to respond; interrupting the other is in theory not allowed, but once a candidate has finished his or her answer, the other has the chance to reflect on what was said.)

After the opening statements of the candidates, the moderators dealt, in their questions, with 8 personal topics (such as Obama’s relationship to Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Clinton’s allegations about her trip to Bosnia), and 6 topics related to current issues: Iraq, Iran, taxes, gun control, affirmative action and gas prices. In total, more time (about 53 minutes) were given to discussing personal topics than to current issues (about 37 minutes). Topics such as health care, immigration or broader trade and economic policies were not mentioned in the debate.

Among others, the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Time magazine, and, as the comments on ABC’s website testify, a significant part of the audience deplored the debate as superficial, sensationalist (but uninteresting) and unsubstantial.

A great blog on citizen journalism

Axel Bruns from the Queensland University of Technology runs an excellent blog on matters related to citizen journalism (and to blogs in particular). He just posted an entry about the publication of a couple of new articles, one of which deals with the idea of the Habermasian public sphere: Life beyond the Public Sphere: Towards a Networked Model for Political Deliberation.

I will post my thoughts about the piece; although I already have quite a long list of things to do, this should be priority. (It perhaps won’t come as a surprise that to some extent I disagree with some of the article’s main points.)

A quick word on Wikipedia

I’ve been meaning to write this post ever since I started this blog; when it comes to the democratizing potential of the internet (at least in spreading knowledge), Wikipedia often springs up as both as a positive (look how successful and surprisingly accurate it is!) and as a negative (look how unreliable it is!) example.

My point is this. No doubt there is a great deal of uncertainty involved in using Wikipedia, stemming from its openness, the relatively small number of admins, the questionable expertise of admins, etc,

BUT

the point of Wikipedia is to cite existing, verifiable sources. Original research is unwelcome. Therefore it is the authority of the sources that renders a Wikipedia entry good or bad, but the thing is you can always check these sources yourself, or indicate that they are missing. If an entry omits citing its sources, that is a bad article, period, and there is no excuse for accepting the information it provides. If an entry does cite its sources, then you can check the facts there, and decide whether you accept or reject these sources’ authority. Either way, complaining about the unreliability of Wikipedia is pointless.

Was this a bit too Captain Obvious?

Inspiration, not aggregation? [updated]

Alexander van Elsas posted an entry about problems faced by, and possible future of, content aggregation; summing up nicely the questions that I myself trying to answer (though without putting it all into the context of a model of public sphere).

If content is aggregated using people, then we get a “democratic” version of the web. It filters out the stuff that the community likes best, leaving the more obscure or less liked stuff behind us. But I’m no[t] so sure that the stuff that comes up this way is always the best stuff. If anything, democracy principles to select information, also lead to predictable and similar content. There isn’t room for obscurity or weird stuff. The people that are in such communities will end up selecting only part of what is out there, governed by themselves and the social community they are part of.

This might of course be true – at least in some cases -; what I’m working on is to find some evidence confirming or refuting this claim, focusing rather not on “obscurity and weird stuff”, but on the appearance of competing views.

Anyhow, in Elsas’ view, aggregated content is becoming just as overwhelming as non-aggregated content; and to make sense of it, we won’t need better filters or meta-aggregators, but inspiration; meaning in this case influential, wise and insightful personal… guidance?; or as he puts it, “storytellers.” Well I’m not exactly sure what he means by this, but he promised to elaborate on the topic later.

[Update: He did.]

In not really related news, The Economist seems now certain that Barack Obama will (or at the very least, should) pick up the presidential nomination of the Democratic party. They are not the only ones; polling firm Rasmussen came to the same conclusion, and just yesterday the campaigns of John McCain and Obama have announced that the two are thinking of holding a series of informal debates in the summer, which strongly suggests that McCain’s staff is also convinced that Obama will pick up the nomination.

I’m sure it will be interesting to see how the patterns change on “my” social news sites once we officially know who the Democratic nominee is.

The future of newspapers

Here’s a recent article from The Economist about difficulties traditional American newspapers have to face. In a nutshell: both circulation figures and advertising revenues continue to fall.

Much of [the] decline is being blamed on the rise of the internet, which offers free, round-the-clock coverage, and which has provided a new, better home for classified advertising, once the bedrock of most newspapers’ revenue. But some of the fall in revenues is actually due to the economic slowdown in America, and especially in the housing market, which contributes a large slice of classified advertising.

All is not gloom and doom, though – the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer are just two examples that it is possible to find a way by adapting to the new business environment.

The cult of the amateur – part 2.

I thought it would be interesting to see what Andrew Keen’s views are on social news sites; in fact I try to dissect here the relevant passages (pp92-96) from chapter 3 – “Truth and lies” in his book I mentioned so many times already.

Keen does not distinguish between social news and social bookmarking sites. I guess you could argue for the conceptualization of putting these sites into the same basket, but I for one prefer not to, because of their different purposes and methods of use. I think that a deeper analysis should be mindful of these differences, even though the principle – aggregating and filtering previously available content – is admittedly the same in both cases.

According to Keen, this principle “cannot be relied upon to keep us informed.” (I think what he really means is that it should not be relied upon.)

When our individual intentions are left to the wisdom of the crowd, our access to information becomes narrowed, and as a result, our view of the world and our perception of truth becomes dangerously distorted. (p94)

The cult of the amateur

“Shrewdly argued,” says the New York Times about Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur” – and I couldn’t disagree more.

To me, the book read like a big huge warning sign or exclamation mark, pointing at the perceived damage the internet is inflicting on established culture industries and – seemingly oddly – on established moral standards. Its statements are indeed eyebrow-raising and powerful, but often also rather blunt, and relying on partly or fully flawed arguments.

The principal idea of the book is this: today, anyone can use the internet as a tool of either mass or interpersonal communication, regardless of whether they posess any kind of expertise or moral responsibility. The results: an armada of at best mediocre, unreliable content, from authors of highly questionable credibility; the total disrespect for intellectual property rights (leading to the collapse of eg. the established movie and music industries); moral standards undermined; and a society where everyone is spying on everyone else (because they can and are encouraged by the – deteriorating – media).

Today’s internet is likened to an infinite number of monkeys (however good intentioned they are, they are still monkeys), typing on an infinite number of typerwriters.

Sound bites in news shrink, role of journalists on the increase

Here is a recently published article – by Michael Schudson and Danielle Haas, taken from the Columbia Journalism Review. It describes the findings of a report by Indiana University professors Erik Bucy and Maria Grabe; most importantly (for me anyway) that:

[w]hat seems to matter more is not what candidates say about themselves, or what they are seen doing, but the depth of reporting and commentary that journalists add to those sound and image bites. Bucy and Grabe find that journalists are increasingly brokers of meaning in political coverage—appearing twice as much as candidates, filling more than half of each news segment with context and commentary. And their interpretations, or lack of them, matter.

It would be a huge and unwarranted jump to take this argument as confirming my view that commenting on social news sites promises to be meaningful and important – but I guess we can say it certainly points to this direction.