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Using Our Powers For Good

I recently re-read Rebecca Blood's 2003 BlogTalk presentation: "waging peace: using our powers for good". It is worth revisiting by anyone who is a blog evangelist or critic. Taking a look at the daily lack of cross linkage on memeorandum.com, unfortunately, it seems almost prophetic.

...People agree most readily with the things they already believe, and everyone has only 24 hours in a day. Because of these two factors, weblogs are too often enclosed in echo-chambers of their own making.
In the book 'Data Smog', David Shenk says: 'Birds of a feather flock virtually together' and this is certainly true of weblogs. He goes on to say: 'The problem... is that people are tuning in and becoming informed--but they're tuning into niche media and they're acquiring specialized knowledge. As our information supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease. Technically, we possess an unprecedented amount of information; however, what is commonly known has dwindled to a smaller and smaller percentage every year. This should be a sobering realization for a democratic nation, a society that must share information in order to remain a union.'

Let me add that it's not just specialized knowledge that we are accessing. It's news and opinion about current events. The Web has given us the ability to retrieve news accounts from around the world. It used to be that most people got their news from just a few sources. This limited access meant that most of us were evaluating events from a common pool of information about the world, or at least a pool that was common to the people around us. But Web users can choose to get their news from wherever they like. And factual accounts of the same events quite often differ substantially in their wording, emphasis, and in the conclusions they draw. We now have the ability to choose from among news accounts until we find one that we feel gets it right.

Now, I don't advocate returning to the pre-Web world of local newspapers. But there are consequences to the wide access we have gained.

Democracy depends on groups of people coming to terms with one another, and devising solutions that will address the needs of most, if not all, of its citizens. Even a system like mine, in the United States, where majority rules, cannot afford to completely ignore the needs of anyone not in the winning party. Democracies simply cannot function unless citizens and policy-makers can talk to one another and achieve some sort of common ground in addressing the issues of the day.

However, when people can choose their news and information from an unlimited variety of sources, they usually will choose sources that confirm their pre-existing biases. According to theFolklorist.com, confirmation bias is 'a tendency on the part of human beings to seek support or confirmation for their beliefs.' It makes sense, if you think about it. The only basis we have in evaluating any source of information is the set of information--including opinions--that we have already decided is true. Very few people will be inclined to choose primary sources of information that consistently put forth ideas that just seem wrong.

This isn't deliberate malice. It's a simple matter of choosing, from the available sources, those that seem most accurate, and those that seem most accurate will always be those that most closely reflect one's own view of the world. So while the Web, in theory, makes it possible to explore many more points of view than ever before, in practice, few people actually do this to the extent that they can.

Read the whole piece.

Karl at Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Share It When You Can Find It: Investigative Journalism

88 percent of newspaper coverage is 'churnalism': rewritten wire copy and PR. Only 12 is derived from reporters initiative or is fact checked.

That's the state of newspaper journalism in Britain according to what Nick Davies has written in his book "Flat Earth News". You can read more about "Flat Earth News" in a recent London Review of Books article (via dangerousmeta).

No wonder the majority of Americans no longer trust the media and folks like Jeff Jarvis are making an issue of it.

We have a clue we are being spun. And I bet that niche media's pursuit of 'authenticity' - the practice of wrapping news in greater and greater extremes of opinion to seem 'genuine' - folks probably feel at an instinctive level the exploitation.

In this environment, it has become more and more difficult to find investigative journalism you might care about or might need to know about.

There are many initiatives that have sprung up over the past few years that attempt to address how investigative journalism can be pursued, developed, created and funded.

Scott Rosenberg shares his doubts about one of the latest, "ProPublica", a non-profit driven by some big names in traditional journalism.

Think about a story the Philadelphia Inquirer recently published: "Philadelphia faces shortage of housing for mentally ill". It was front page of the Local section. Some editor thought that I, as a reader, would find that story interesting or pertinent.

In a world driven purely by linkage, PageRank, traffic counts, and other topic based story algorithm filtering systems - would I see that story? Would that story even be written? Who is its audience?

Think about it. And what it means for your knowledge of others that sit outside your topical or social spheres.

Now I'm not saying that algorithm driven - or crowd driven - news filtering is bad. Far from it.

Nor am I saying that a world where only 'experts' provide access to the news stories is good. Again far from it.

But the folks who *do* say one or the other are selling something. And it is at our expense.

Karl at Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The NYTimes gets into Blog Aggregation!

TechCrunch: NYTimes Blogrunner v. TechMeme.

They are using a technique I had originally suggested while I worked at Philly.com to handle the enormous legal and quality concerns - use a third party aggregator service like Blogrunner.

Bravo to the NYTimes :)

Karl at Wednesday, November 7, 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Great Example of Networked Journalism

EarthTimes.org: "Consumer Reports Names Their All-Star Appliances":

"Our brand-repair histories are culled from approximately 450,000 respondents reporting on nearly 2.5 million appliances," said Robert Markovich, editor at Consumer Reports. "Choosing a reliable brand will boost a consumer's odds of getting a reliable model and in the end often save consumers money."

You can even say the report was 'crowdsourced'.

Now if only we could collate a list of safe and fun toys that parents would want to buy.

Karl at Wednesday, November 7, 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

1 in 3 Americans Still Believe Saddam Involved in 9/11

Unbelievable isn't it?

Editor & Publisher: "Hit and Myth: Poll Shows 1 in 3 Americans Still Believe Saddam Involved in 9/11".

Wow.

The sad thing is, predictably, pundits and experts on both sides of the new media debate (something I have yet to understand) will inevitably point fingers.

Nick Carr: "The people formerly known as informed".

Dan Gillmor: "Journalists Failure to Dispel Saddam-9/11 Myth is Media Scandal".

Mathew Ingram: "News flash: Digg headlines not "real" news".

Fact: Despite the information revolution, despite the advent of 24/7 cable news, despite the advent of 24/7 talk radio, despite the Internet, set aside the Web and participatory media for just a minute, it's already been determined we're no better informed about our world than in 1989.

So those who long for the good old days can point your fingers at bloggers all you want.

And those who say today far better than the past can point your fingers at 'traditional' media journalists all you want.

The failure is complete. It is across the board.

And it portends terrible things for our democracy and society as a whole.

Karl at Thursday, September 13, 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Yahoo! and Google Move to Squeeze Newspapers Further

Yahoo! has relaunched it's local search service. It better surfaces community driven participation and feels far more like a destination than before.

Screenwerk: Yahoo! Refreshes, Redesigns Local.

They still haven't gone as far as I expect them to one day do - integrate Flickr, del.icio.us, and Groups, and Maps into a cohesive whole, but the potential is there.

On the other side is Google, which recently launched its Business Referral Representative program.

Google will now pay you as an independent contractor to collect information on local businesses, telling them about Ad Words, and submitting them to Google Maps. You can read more about it from here and a recent SearchEngineWatch article.

Karl at Friday, August 17, 2007 | Comments (1) | TrackBack

We're No Better Informed About Our World Than In 1989

Despite the information and communication revolutionary time we live in, Americans remain in the dark about our world.

Pew released a survey back in April detailing Americans knowledge of current affairs, comparing the status quo to that of 1989.

We've had a literal explosion of new media and communications services and tools come into being these past 15 years. They have completely reshaped how we get our news and how we connect with our communities.

Social Networks, Blogs, RSS, News Aggregators, Email, Email Lists, Message Boards, Websites, News portals, the Web, the Internet, Cable network 24/hr. news, talk radio, online magazines, collaborative news filters, algorithmic news filters, the list goes on and on.

You would think with so many choices, so many avenues to get informed, we'd actually be better informed.

You'd be wrong.

On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.
In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle's name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.

The survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs.

I'm among a bunch of folks who tend to trumpet online services as a cure-all for our past lack of information awareness and communications access.

On the opposite side of the bench have been those who have sounded alarm after alarm about how our ever growing media-and-communications-scape will fragment us ever further and result in ever tightening echo chambers, making us less informed about subject matter as a whole.

Turns out both perspectives are wrong.

Here we are, with so much new technology, so much new media, transforming the way we live our lives, and yet we are as informed, as ill informed, as we were in 1989.

Newsweek: Dunce-Cap Nation

Wired: Infoporn: Despite the Web, Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed

Karl at Thursday, August 16, 2007 | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Digby reveals herself

Whether you are interested in the social software/media as a toolset for activism and participatory politics, or reporting the news, or simply community, there is something for you in Digby's speech at Take Back America 2007. Take the time and give a listen to her today:

Karl at Wednesday, June 20, 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Congratulations Rajiv

Congrats to Rajiv Pant, who has taken a job in NYC at Conde Nast Publications as VP of Information Technology for CondeNet!

Rajiv was my manager (and eventually VP) at Philly.com and Knight Ridder, before the dotcombust, back when KR took risks and had a future. He's a real visionary who always finds a way. I learned a lot from him during my time there and miss our deep talks about the nature of well.. just about everything.

Rajiv, my friend, congrats to you :)

Karl at Monday, June 18, 2007 | Comments (0) | TrackBack