FreshNetworks Blog

I’ve spent the last ten days with no Internet and very little access to English-language news sources. On my return I turned to my three favourite sources for getting up to speed quickly on what’s been happening: BBC News, Twitter and Google. The first of these for an overview of what had happened and the last two to really delve into some depth, to find out what people have been saying and to see what’s really been happening.

It turns out I missed a lot.

Only a few years ago, my main source of information on anything from the events in Iran, to the events in Los Angeles would have been a printed newspaper or magazine. I could have picked up one of the weeklies at Heathrow airport on Sunday and found out most of what there was for me to find out on the journey home. Today things are very different. There’s a vast array of information out there from news outlets to people like you and me. People who might (at least claim that they) know more than the new outlets, or at least are more willing to tell us.

Both the aftermath of the Iran election and the death of Michael Jackson have highlighted the role that users can play in generating  news content. Keeping us up-to-date on what they are seeing, hearing and thinking. And often doing this more quickly than traditional news sources. The way we find out about what is happening is now quicker than ever  before.

Speed of reporting is important for news and has been the focus of many important developments. The Crimean war in the 1850s saw the arrival of reporting that must have felt to readers of the day like ‘real-time’ updates. For the first time, electric telegraph enabled news to travel across Europe in hours and not weeks. People could find out what was happening at the Front. This was a real revolution. The increased speed at which we could get news and reporting changed what people wrote about and how they wrote about it – the birth of the ‘embedded’ journalist with the troops. This was the first time people could hear about battles and what was happening in the war whilst they were still pertinent. People felt they knew more and knew more quickly. They felt like they could change things.

And the use of user-generated news is bringing similar changes thanks to the speed at which it is letting people tell us what they are seeing and hearing. This is changing the kind of news we are exposed to. Whereas previously we would see reports that a journalist had crafted and would assess how much credit we gave to that particular journalist, source or publication. We are now getting snippets of information from multiple sources and each time  have to assess what we think about that source and that piece of information. The many thousands of comments an news-snippets on Twitter about Iran or Michael Jackson need to be evaluated  – which do we trust (and why); which are we interested in find out more about (and why); which snippets when put together give us a fuller picture of events (and why).

There is a danger with this kind of news. A danger that people will question less and that things that are not true or have less critical appraisal will start to influence what we think and what we do. I’m more optimistic. I think that the  massive growth in real-time news will make us be more critical and help teach us to process this new kind of information – taking in more from a wider range of sources and filtering out what we don’t trust and query things by looking for other sources. This has to be a good thing.

And of course it means that we will get this information quicker than ever before. What this means for traditional news outlets is probably another story…

Some more reading

• Michael Jackson: Information Overload (geeksaresexy.net)
• Web slows after Jackson’s death (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Twitter and the news cycle, perfect together (ethanzuckerman.com)

The real power of all the user-generated content and ideas that result from an increasing use of social media depends on our being able to find it. It’s no use to have millions upon millions of comments added each day if we can’t find them, or if we can’t sort for the ones most relevant to us at a particular moment.

This is, of course, not a new problem. Information from the earliest Medieval libraries to today’s online communities and social networks has needed sorting, categorising and cataloguing so that we  can find it successfully. Twitter users have a simple way of helping to sort data – the hashtag.

The concept is simple. A short code is added to the end of a Tweet to associate it with others – this then lets people search for everything on this  subject. So, for example, if you were tweeting at this weekend’s Glastonbury music festival in the UK then you could add the code #glastonbury to your tweet. If you wanted to search for what’s happening then you just need to search for everything with this code.

Hashtags are great for events and are a really effective way of associating related tweets with each other. But they are quite limited. As a means of sorting and cataloguing data they are very simple, perhaps too simple.

This became quite clear over the last couple of weeks with the use of the hashtag #iranelection. The tag was originally used by people in Iran who were tweeting updates about what was happening. Others in Iran were able to find out about  events, protests and developments by tracking these updates. The hashtag wasn’t the most used on Twitter but it was serving it’s purpose. Then it suddenly became popular, very popular. And that’s when you start to see the weaknesses of this way of organising information.

The #iranelection hashtag started being used by people not in Iran searching for information or merely expressing concern for or interest in what was happening in the country. The tweets from people on the ground were much less easy to find with hundreds of tweets from well wishers mixed in there. Information was much more difficult to find as the hashtag became more popular.

Whilst simple, the hashtag has limitations associated with this. One of the real challenges for Twitter (and indeed for many other social media sites) is finding ways to sort, file and catalogue information in a way that makes it easy for others to find. This is not easy – in part it depends on the fundamental structure of the site itself, and in part on the ways in which users use the site.

The ideal might be a way to filter content by type, by user information and by a series of categories. But this requires that you gather more profiling information than many of these sites do (or indeed than many users would want to give) and providing a way to categorise both at a parent and child level, which is complicated from an information architecture perspective. Resolving this is the real challenge of social media – finding a way to search for and discover information we want. It is this that will really show the benefits that social media can bring.

Some more reading

• Social Media and #IranElection | bigMETHOD (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• How to Search Twitter (olago.wordpress.com)
• Twitter numbers up thanks to Iran (thisisherd.com)
• Iran Twitter: Why The Movement Adopted This Medium (huffingtonpost.com)
• Iran, Twitter and the value of new media (sluggerotoole.com)
• ‘It’s Hot in Iran’ Is Latest Tech PR Gimmick (gawker.com)

Image by youngrobv (Rob & Ale) via Flickr

There has been a lot of talk over the last year of Obama’s election as the first social media election. And it is certainly true that there is much we can all learn from how Obama used social media as a candidate during the election process. But over the last couple of days we’ve seen another use of social media in elections – reporting on the fallout from the election results in Iran.

The presidential election in Iran was held on the 12th June, between incumbent Ahmadinejad and rival Mousavi. The result was a landslide for Ahmadinejad, and opposition supporters have since been protesting the results. There has been mixed coverage of this in traditional media – with many criticising CNN for its coverage, and the BBC seemingly blocked in Iran as a result of its reports on what is happening.

It is in social media that the wealth and depth of information is to be found. And some of this is quite remarkable:

• Twitter is perhaps the best place to follow what is happening in real time (#iranelection). And it is also the source of some particularly unique insights, such as the Tweet from Mousavi saying that he had been placed under house arrest.
• Blogs allow coverage in more detailed form from bloggers both inside and outside Iran and from all parts of the political spectrum
• YouTube is a source of video content from inside Iran, often in a raw and unfiltered manner.
• Flickr is building a library of user-created images of riots and the aftermath of the election.

In all, the amount of information that is being shared about what happened, and is currently happening in Iran is huge. People are creating content and, thanks to efficient search, others are able to find it.

If Obama’s use of social media showed how candidates can harness it to support their own campaign, and to build their own brand, the case of the Iranian elections shows how the public can use social media to express their own opinion and to show what is happening.

One of the real developments that we are experiencing at the moment online is a exponential proliferation of information. Cases like the aftermath of the Iranian election are a great example of this. We can follow things in real-time thanks to services like Twitter, but we are also documenting the events for the future and doing so through the words, voices, eyes and ears of users themselves. Perhaps that is equally important.