Dan Gilmor lets us in on "We the Media"

On April 16, 2007, my senior year of high school, I watched the news in shock, horror, and fear as I learned about the shootings at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the subsequent deaths of 32 students and faculty, including the suicide of the shooter himself, Seung, Hui Cho, a student. Seeing a news report about a college-campus shooting while I was ready to head to college myself added an even darker element to the entire tragedy. I flipped through all the major news networks and channels hoping to get some form of variation, some breaking news leak about the shooter, or the status of the victims. While news stations began showing interviews of Virginia Tech students, hospital workers, and other witnesses, what seemed to be lacking from the reports was a real understanding of what had happened. How did a student manage to shoot over 174 rounds across many areas of campus? How did he do it? Who was shot? More importantly, did anyone witness it?

As I tuned in, I began seeing video footage of the Virginia Tech campus, police running around frantically, and the sound of multiple gunshots. The video quality was poor and shaky, but it was better than any other footage networks had been showing previously. This was what I wanted to see: raw, natural, and true-to-life eyewitness video. Every channel began streaming the video on repeat and I realized then that what was streaming all over every news network was not film from a paid, professional videographer or journalist, but a normal, everyday Virginia Tech citizen who happened to have a video-recording feature on his cell phone. That’s a new idea. The new technology, the phone, gave this normal, everyday person the ability to record a video clip that gave all viewers an opportunity to really experience what Virginia Tech faced that tragic morning.  

In We the Media Daniel Gilmor explains this phenomenon through his study of a grassroots form of journalism, he calls: citizen journalism.  At the Virginia Tech tragedy, the student who captured the video became a journalist. Had he planned to do so? No. Did he agree to get paid to film the chaos that morning? No, however I do wonder if he received some sort of recognition or prize afterwards. This was just a person who previously may have only watched news about breaking stories and events, now he was making the news himself. Video-capable phones had been a recent feature and now it was becoming more and more clear how important these new add-ons had become. That video was on every news station! He and the news networks could not have planned for that.

New technologies and most importantly web 2.0, the read-write web, has opened up the doors to everyday people being journalists themselves. For years, news stations served as information gatekeepers. They determined what was newsworthy, their biases may have influenced those decisions, and what we saw was somewhat of a filtered down and framed version of world events. However, as Gilmor points out, “the rules for newsmakers, not just journalists, have changed, thanks to everyone’s ability to make the news.” Cell phones have become much more sophisticated and packed with features; enough to the point where calling them “phones” is truly not a proper term. Smartphones like a Blackberry, an iPhone, or an Android are media devices because so many things can be done with them. Not only can you now call a friend if you witness a “newsworthy” event, but you can send them photos, video, and audio recordings that make the experience all the more powerful. Everyone is becoming a photographer. We are spreading information and therefore determining what is newsworthy. Nowadays, you turn on the news and oftentimes certain segments will be devoted entirely to viewer submissions. Therefore citizens and news networks are now deeming these photos and video clips as newsworthy, even if they are poor quality. These are the new media that are at the forefront of these social changes that make everyday citizens a part of the news we consume.

It’s not just journalism that is changing however. Gilmor references our book from last week, The Cluetrain Manifesto and how the read-write web also impacts businesses. Like the authors of Cluetrain he explains how the advent of citizen journalism allows for much greater transparency of company activities, even on actions company executives may have wanted to keep secret from the public. Gilmor says that the web is a very important development, “It has allowed more and more activists to shine a light on material that powerful institutions would prefer to hide” (p 52).  We already discussed in class how blogs and forums allow people to make their own business decisions independent of what company marketers want you to believe. We know that businesses have had to alter their strategies to account for a whole new way of viewing products. We also know that the Cluetrain authors alluded to much more than businesses being altered.

I began writing this paper in the library, and was interrupted by the sound of walkie talkies buzzing behind me.  I had been gchatting with my friend when I heard the familiar jingle of keys and heavy boots, turned around, and two Lehigh Policemen were heading towards an office in the back part of the library. I watched them as they opened the door, spoke to the head librarian and took notes. I wondered what was going on. Was there a security breach? Had something been stolen? Was someone in the wrong place at the wrong time? I reported back to my friend what was going on, and I reached for my phone to take a picture but before I could get a good shot, the policeman looked at me funny. Not wanting to piss off a cop, I went back to writing this essay. I realize how pervasive this idea of citizen journalism really is. Here I was in the library, my purpose being there to complete an assignment, when I witnessed some sort of event reported it to a friend, and was close to providing photographic evidence of the event. We are all becoming part of the media and we don’t even notice it.

Gilmor stresses the importance of us, the people, and how thanks to new technology, we are the media. We are determining what is newsworthy. We are finding the video, audio, and photographs quicker than any other professional journalist, and news networks have had to respond to us. No longer can we passively watch the news, we can go out, show people what we see, and then others can also have a clearer version of the world. We are the “new media” and as a result great social changes are and will be happening.

Reflection on: The Cluetrain Manifesto

Last semester, I received one of the most surprising, funny, and cringe-inducing Facebook notifications of my life, a friend request from Hector L. Lopez, my father.  Up until recently, my Facebook account was, along with many of my peers, a private social networking site that specifically excluded certain people: parents. Once Facebook expanded its capacity to include anyone with a birth date and email address, it became a much bigger world, where the privacy and exclusivity of college life was now at the mercy of nosey relatives and friends who could relay information and gossip back to people who otherwise would not have had access to such things. Getting a friend request from my father wasn’t scary because I was afraid he would look at pictures and punish me, or anything like that, but I was more so surprised that he had even managed to make an account. You see, my dad is an older man, and not very tech-savvy and the way I see it, he views and uses technology in very static terms. This button does this, if I click that this will happen, if it doesn’t work- it must be broken. Although he uses email and browses the web, I don’t always think he fully grasps the vastness of these new technologies and the Internet and what it has to offer. He simply just doesn’t seem to get it. 

My facebook status on that fateful day my father friended me

            Over thanksgiving break, my dad wanted me to teach him how to use Facebook, and I found myself frustrated when trying to explain the purpose of a status update, or what a wall was, and why the news feed featured certain things and not others. I gave up trying to teach him these concepts, and so he chose to just not use his Facebook because he claimed, “he would never get it” and that it was not useful to him. 

I really did feel bad, but he grew up in a totally different time, and for him to grasp these ideas and learn how to use tools like Facebook or Twitter would require a completely new mind-set and education. I wasn’t ready to sit for hours and teach him how to use a website that in my mind, he would never understand. 

 The Cluetrain Manifesto is described primarily as a business book, but after reading it and understanding how heavily the business theories and ideas rely on interpersonal relationships and communication, it is clear that the book is not just about how to properly market XXX corporation. Rather, it is trying to close that divide between corporations and their consumers and audience, by stressing that markets are conversations. In our web 2.0 world today, these conversations exist through blogs, forums, and other sharing devices where people can talk to each other about what products and services they like without having to be confined by the messages sent from the companies themselves.  If corporations can properly learn how to break down the walls that have been built up from years of advertising, marketing, public relations, and other propaganda and to begin conversations with their consumers they can roll through the tides of web 2.0 unscathed, and be successful. I found the ideas in Cluetrain enlightening and refreshing. 

The ideas all seemed to properly address how the changes in the Internet and social media have and will force corporations to change how they do business. The Cluetrain authors Levine, Locke, Searls, and Weinberger also mentioned several threats to the proper implementation of these new business practices, and the one I found to be most problematic, and most relatable to my personal life, was that of the growing digital divide in our society and globally. The digital divide is a nice term that describes the imbalance between those with access to information and technology and those with much less access. Those with access are at a significant advantage, and is a fact of life that these corporations will have to take into consideration when changing their marketing strategies. 

Although new technologies offer new and innovative ways of accessing information and ways for people to communicate, all the flash, complications, glitz, and “coolness”  that comes along with them are not always concepts that are easily understood by our less tech-savvy friends, like my father. I mentioned my dad’s new Facebook account because I saw how clearly it related to the digital divide that seems to be expanding in our society. Cluetrain mentions that access has expanded greatly over the years to 75% of the population having Internet. However, as important as it is for people to have access to the Internet, if older generations cannot properly be integrated into these new tools, access really means nothing. It’s the know-how and the education that matter when trying to involve older generations into the conversation. The authors say:

“If we’re serious about getting as many people as possible under our conversational tent, we need to get serious about designing inclusivity into the web…one of the keys to acceleration the social changes has been reducing or eliminating barriers to entry, reducing the friction stopping people from participating in conversations” (pg 27).

Some may view these efforts to include older generations as unimportant, but they are as important as the younger, more tech-literate generations if corporations want to get as many people under this “conversational tent.” 

Being home for winter break, I had quite a bit of down time and sat down again with my dad for another Facebook tutorial. To my surprise, he had learned quite a bit in the weeks that I had been back at Lehigh, and he was now Facebook-literate, posting status updates and liking pages like a pro. Although I had previously held a much less optimistic view on my father’s potential to fully grasp Facebook and understand the components, he had learned after all, and was now contributing and participating in the network. My mistake was giving up too quickly on him, and I fear that many corporations are doing the same to people who may need some catching-up to do. Markets can only be conversations if all people can participate, not just those of us who already know the tricks involved into making it into this global chat. I couldn't bear to sit with him for hours to teach him how to use this website because I believed he would never understand it. Corporations need to be willing to put in that extra work for these people if they truly want to succeed in the web 2.0 world.