In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, we instituted a complicated emergency alert system, involving sirens, loudspeakers, text messages, and emails. The whole thing gets tested far more frequently than it really needs to– every few weeks, we get a barrage of emails warning us that a test is coming up, then another barrage of emails and text messages on the day of the test.
The system has been used exactly once, and it was a fiasco. A year or so ago, we got a flurry of messages telling us that there had been a shooting a couple of blocks from campus. These directed everyone to a web page for more information (which wasn’t actually at the address given), and for the rest of the day, there was a steady stream of updates about how the police were looking for suspects fitting a vague description, driving a car of indeterminate type, and so on.
It took several hours for all of this urgent! emergency! information! to settle down into the actual facts of the case, which were nothing at all like the nervous-making initial messages. I’m still hazy on the details, but the actual story was that there were gunshots fired a mile or two from campus, and a car with bullet holes in the windows had been moved to a parking spot six or eight blocks from campus.
I thought of this when I was reading Bora’s novella about new media and news reporting.
(OK, “reading” is an overstatement. “Skimming the first few sections of” is closer to the truth, because I have a day job, and it doesn’t involve me reading that much bloggy triumphalism.)
Bora’s piece is longer than most articles on the subject, but the basic content appears to be the same as the last N posts about how blogs can replace/ improve upon traditional media. Bloggers and Twitter-ers and “Citizen Journalists” can generate lots of immediate on-the-scene information about important events, so it’s not true that blogs can’t report the news.
All of that is perfectly true, but I don’t see how it’s helpful. Or, rather, I don’t see how it fixes the major problems with the existing media structure.
To borrow a distinction that Greg Bear was making at length at Boskone, the problem is not that traditional media don’t deliver enough information. The problem is that they don’t deliver enough knowledge. We’re not suffering from a dearth of breathless on-the-scene reportage, but a lack of filtering of that breathless reportage to produce useful knowledge about what’s actually going on.
Bloggers, media critics, and Comedy Central fake-news anchors rightly mock the major news networks for latching onto trivial stories-of-the-moment, but that’s not a problem of a lack of information– quite the contrary. They’re providing tons of information, but it’s useless information about stupid stuff.
This blizzard of trivia is inevitable, though, for the simple reason that there just aren’t that many truly important events happening on any given day. There are some events– the September 11th attacks, the beginning of a war, etc.– that really do demand hour-by-hour coverage, but those events, thankfully, are few and far between. Most stories that are really important develop over days if not weeks or months. But when you have a 24-hour cable news channel, you need to put something on the hair for all 24 of those hours, so you end up latching onto trivialities to fill the time.
Blogs don’t really improve on this. The political/news blogs I read focus on different trivialities, but in the end, they’re not doing anything all that much better than CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News– you could easily distill the hundreds of blog posts crossing my RSS reader every day into a daily or weekly digest, with no loss of useful information.
They’re not doing anything wrong, any more than the campus emergency alert system was doing anything wrong in passing along the information they got. What we got was more or less what the police were getting and passing along to campus safety, and in a certain sense, it’s a fascinating document of how this sort of event unfolds. It’s nice to have that information in retrospect, but the number of people who actually need that information as it arrives is very small, and does not include 99.9% of the people getting the various alert messages.
What we need is not so much newer and better sources of information, what we need is a better way to filter the information that we’re getting. Bora gives examples of a bunch of messages that might’ve turned up on Twitter regarding the plane landing on the Hudson a while back, and it’s perfectly true the example messages he gives would be really great information to have:
“A plane just landed on Hudson”
“A plane landed on Hudson, took pic with cellphone, see it here:”
“A plane landed on Hudson, on ferry going to save people”
“A plane landed on Hudson, I am on it, everyone alive”
“I am a pilot. I just landed a plane on Hudson. Bird strike – both engines”
These are all great stuff. The problem is picking those out from:
“OMG! A plane just crashed!”
“A plane crash, oh the humanity!
“Terrorists just shot down a plane!”
“Somebody just hijacked a plane and flew it into the Statue of Liberty!”
to say nothing of all the “My cat’s breath smells like cat food!” and “Britney Spears iz fat LOL!1!!!1!” stuff that’s just noise.
If you happen to be looking in the right place at the right moment, new media can deliver wonderful immediate coverage. But then, so can old media. The problem with both is knowing where you need to be looking while things are happening. Most of the really great examples of on-the-scene reporting via blogs or Twitter or whatever are things that prove to be great hours or days later– when somebody who knows how the events played out looks back at what was written at the time, and picks out the handful of sources that had everything right.
So, while Bora makes a convincing case that new media tools could take over and improve on the role of traditional media outlets, I don’t think I believe this is a Good Thing. The big problem I see is that the 24-hour news cycle is leading to an oversupply of trivial or even incorrect information. Rather than fixing things, blogs seem to me to turn that up to 11, and I don’t think that’s going to be helpful.