Friday Chat: Paperless Student Publications and Media

Happy Paperless Friday!

Today at 10:15AM EST, we'll be discussing paperless student publications and media over at the Friday Chat.

Paperless student newspapers, digital radio podcasts, and live-streamed student broadcasts are the subject of the day. See you there!

The Revolution Will Be Complementary?

Ethan Zuckerman has got a piece on protest and social media that's required reading over at ...My Heart's in Accra.

The use of social media for protest - especially to promote a protest to international audiences - is far from unique.

Hmm... I'm interested. Do tell.

I’ve been asking some of the reporters I’ve spoken with where they were on other recent social media and protest stories. Citizen media has emerged as one of the key spaces for journalism in Fiji in the wake of a coup government that’s censoring mainstream media. It’s been a key source of information in Madagascar as that country’s suffered through a violent change of government. (One reporter who I mentioned this to remarked that Madagascar was “just a speck of an island somewhere”. That speck is twice the size of Great Britain and has the population of Australia…) In Guatemala, online media publicized the assasination of a lawyer by forces close to the president… and government authorities began arresting people for twittering the story to amplify it. These weren’t huge stories for most newspapers - the Iran story is huge not because of the social media aspect, but because protests in Iran are a huge story independent of citizen media.

In all these cases, it looks like the real role of social media is in amplifying the story to a broader audience. In a sense, that is the current role of social media in the synergy with established traditional media which we described yesterday.

The shift is that through critical mass, social media is now able to make the stories we used to tell around the kitchen table or at the corner bar now available immediately as a primary source to the world's media.

So, the stories themselves are going to have a different feel or focus.

In a way, as a musician, I can't help but see in the amateur video coming from the streets of Tehran the same sort of ethos that was present and has been instrumental in the lo-fi and documentary movements in audio recording. It's about getting the moment on tape, all else be damned.

In a way, it's a perfect complement to the remarkable on-the-street professional reporting of pros like Roger Cohen whose recent NY Times Op-Ed is one of the best pieces of writing I've read in ages.

How about: "The Revolution Will Be Complementary"?

***

I agree with Zuckerman that the Iran story is huge not because of social media as the focus but because it's a big story regardless.

However, the secondary impact is that the Iran story is in fact a big story for social media. In reality, the biggest yet.

Perhaps even, the game changer.

The Conversation on #IranElections

Absolutely vivid discussion/argument/whateveryouwannacallit going on the last few days in the comments to a post on Weblogg-ed titled "#IranElections: Why We All Need to be Editors Now".

Read it. Comment. Diigo it up.

Ignore at your own risk.

On the Media: Eyes on the Ground

Pulled an early post from this morning because it really didn't say what I wanted it to. It's so easy as a blogger to just put stuff out there and forget about it. So I wanted to do this post right.

In all the talk about traditional media and social media, between cable news and Twitter, between that generation and this generation... there has been one thing vitally missing: the people involved.

Thank god for Robert Fisk. His reporting from the streets of Baghdad comes in the best tradition of in-the-moment reporters stemming from Edward R. Murrow right up to the present. Without these reporters, news is just a sham.

Thank god also for the students and Twitterers inside Iran who have risked so much to show to the world what their country is going through. They too have a little Murrow in them.

It's easy, in the heat of battle as-it-were, to sling arrows with little regard for where they fall. Fisk and his ilk deserve better than to be compared to studio reporters who wouldn't know a story if it exploded in front of them. And the Iranian Twitterers deserve better than to be written off or -- even worse -- merely defined by their medium.

When it comes down to the brass tacks, good reporting isn't about whether you publish in the New York Times or whether you Tweet from a college dorm in Tehran. It's about whether you are honest about what you see.

Changes are taking place in front of our eyes. The mainstream media will not be the same after the events that have taken place in Iran. Not if they can be honest with themselves.

Likewise, the role of social media has changed. When you have the US Department of State telling Twitter not to shut down for scheduled maintenance in the midst of the protests, you know we have transcended the old criticisms of social media as a meaningless trend.

This is the world our students are growing up in. And more than anything, I hope that the events of the past days will change the way school leaders view social media.

But even more important than that, I hope for all humanities' sake, we recognize the value in having eyes on the ground with connections to the rest of us.

The Connection

Speaking of thought provoking, check out the work being done over at elearnspace:

...being a literate person is not so much about what you know, but about how you know things are connected.

This is a riff on the old adage that it's not what you know, but how you know. I like the extension to connectedness; it feels right. Because we really are living through times -- as the examples of #IranElection and Twitterfall have demonstrated wholeheartedly -- in which understanding how to read the connection is crucial to the understanding of the content or situation at hand.

Just yesterday I got in a comments-argument with a fellow Web-citizen over the value of traditional media versus social media. What amounted to a lot of bickering really made me pause upon reflection this morning that really it's just a matter of how we read the connections made by either media.

It was my interloper's perspective that traditional media was more authoritative because the reporters are professionals. My argument against that is that because they are professionals, they are bound by the customs of their institutions -- whether we're talking about the ethics of their profession or the top-down management of news via the hierarchy that exists in corporate media.

It was my perspective that, though there are obviously dubious positions that will emerge, by and large the critical mass of the blogosphere actually keeps things relatively honest; thereby, videos and pictures and news reports Tweeted by amateurs-on-the-street are just as viable a news source as any professionally tweaked report. Now, an argument can certainly be made that mass-made anonymous media could easily be rife with untruth. Point taken.

In the end result, what it really comes down to is understanding the connection.

How is the traditional reporter connecting to you; what are the filters? Editors? Advertising dollars?

How is the amateur-on-the-street connecting to you? What are the motives? Biases?

We have always taught our students to be aware of bias. But now it's taken a new turn. And it's the turn that hints at the dilemma in 21st century media. Big corporate machines vs. Mr. Nobody. It's an age old story; but now, Mr. Nobody has equal billing.

Make the connections.

Philistines on Twitter: "I've never used it. But it sucks!"

John Ridley raises philistinism to a whole new level by slamming all things Twitter -- despite the fact that he admits he's never used Twitter.

I haven't tweeted once in my life, but I'm sick of hearing about it already. What once may have been the cool way of letting a hundred people know that you're about to go mow your lawn now has the feel of a used-to-be-fresh means of communicating.

How do people like this get airtime on NPR?

As any daily Twitterer knows: Twitter is what you make it. If all of your Tweets concern bathing your dog and mowing the lawn, then you just completely don't understand what social networking's true potential is. I am amazed when I hear people denigrate social media as if the social media itself is forcing anyone to do anything. The whole concept of participatory media is that it relies on the free participation of its users to do what ever they want with it.

Education and Educational Technology Tweet feeds are often a perfect example of the positive aspects of social media. I am not alone in saying that I've learned more about the theory of, current debates about, and resources for teaching in the last three months on Twitter than I have in seven years of traditional professional development and three years of grad school.

That's not to denigrate prof dev or grad school, they serve serious purposes.

It's just that in terms of keeping up to date with what's happening on a day-to-day (and even hourly-by-hourly) basis in the rapidly changing educational paradigm, the traditional model of spreading ideas via a single speaker or a class that meets twice a week is really outmoded. That's where the power of social networking comes in.

Social networking should not supplant face-to-face development, but face-to-face development needs to understand that there are many things that social networking does better. Really, face-to-face and screen-to-screen have to find common ground and help one another.

Now, Mr. Ridley's comments seemed all caught up on the issue of privacy -- he's tired of Tweets about people's personal lives. Funny, though: how would he be bother by Tweets if he's not on Twitter?

Furthermore, to criticize Twitter on account of the CNN/Kutcher throwdown -- as Ridley does -- yet never having personally used the service before is akin to writing a scathing review of a book based not on one's reading of the book but on the reaction of Oprah's book club to it.

Fundamentally unprofessional.

It's obvious that Mr. Ridley has no idea what he's talking about. Yet, that's par for the course when it comes to the majority of critics of social media. I think I'll go Tweet about that.