Making Sense of the Flood

The image we all remember from the London terror bombings last July 7 is a grainy snapshot. The picture, captured on a mobile phone camera, shows people escaping from a subway train. In the foreground, a man is holding a cloth over his nose and mouth so he can breathe more easily in the smoky subway.

The photograph, one of the best examples to date of a phenomenon many call citizen journalism, reflects the democratization of information. The collision of media and technology has given us powerful, inexpensive tools to create digital content, ranging from blogs to podcasts to videos and more. Distribution, too, has been opened via global communications networks. But as these media floodgates open, the sheer quantity of information available will force citizens to develop new tools to filter media sources and develop a more skeptical approach to what they read, listen to, and view.

The age of citizen media is coming. Contrary to some utopian (or is that dystopian?) claims, it is not likely to kill off today’s mass media, though traditional media’s business models are under ferocious attack. Rather, grassroots efforts will be an essential part of an emerging media ecosystem, which includes the world of “old media” but also transforms it into more of a conversation and less of a lecture.

This new media age is not simply democratization of the production of information; the democratization of access is at least as valuable as our individual ability to participate. We don’t have to settle anymore for the newspaper someone tosses into the driveway or be satisfied with the five o’clock news broadcast. We always knew there was more. Now we can get it speedily and easily.

We can—and many of us do—assemble our own news reports from these vast data streams. We can use tools to help navigate our way through the masses of information. But our current tools are crude, and the flood of data gets more overwhelming all the time.

The “Daily Me”—a roll-your-own collection of news from the sources we’ve learned to trust—has already arrived in some respects. Services such as MyYahoo let us collect on one page the latest headlines from a variety of news organizations and others. Using a technology called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), we can collect many different Web “feeds” into one browser window or stand-alone application. Then there are all the mailing lists, discussion groups, podcasts (audio files downloaded to digital devices), and videos, among many ways to be informed, entertained or otherwise diverted.

Yet this is not enough, not when new sources of “content,” as the information industry likes to call creative endeavors and conversations, are flooding into our homes and offices. How can we find useful news from unfamiliar sources, for example? What—whom—can we trust?

Luckily, the Daily Me is evolving into what we might think of as a “Daily We” where recommendations from the wider community supplement our own selections in a collaborative filtering process.

Websites such as Kuro5hin, Digg, Newsvine and Memeorandum give us a taste of what’s possible. At Digg (a tech-oriented site), for example, users flag stories as interesting, and members of the community vote; the story rises on the page with the number of votes. Memeorandum, which currently focuses on politics and tech, combines traditional news and blogs to help track and understand the web conversation about current top news.

As intriguing as these experiments are, they only hint at what’s coming to help manage the news torrent. We will need tools that combine machine and human intelligence, reputation, and popularity.

Readers and viewers will also need to bring a more sophisticated approach to interpreting media reports and news sources. When any website can be made to look as slick as any other, and rumors race around the net at the speed of light while truth trails in a sometimes futile chase, the reader (or viewer or listener) has to be more skeptical at the outset. Although it seems that younger people are better at this online scrutiny than their elders—a topic that needs much more research—almost everyone needs a BS-detector upgrade.

A democratized media sphere has clear advantages over the controlling, top-down system of the past. But our newfound freedoms as users of information have their complications; and we need to deploy better tools—starting with a strong dose of common sense—to make the best use of it all.



Dan Gillmor is director of the Center for Citizen Media, which is affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and the University of California, Berkeley. He will be giving a talk, “Engaging with the News, Part I: The Daily Me and We,” tomorrow at 7 p.m. in Pound Hall 102 at Harvard Law School.