new media

I shouldn't be surprised…
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… but I am. Yesterday I read an interview with of the more well-known authors and journalists. He basically said:

I can never see any important being written inside the blogosphere that would not end up on the news.

Maybe he is right about that part. However is that the purpose of blogs? Definitely not, it never has been. The basic purpose is for “normal” people to connect to their friend via the internet and tell whatever they feel like. Is that good or bad? You might argue that blogs are increasing the total amount of information on the web, but in the era of search engines this is not a major problem. Therefore it is all good.

More on the future of the new improved media, partly blogs then read my other blog entries on the subject.

The only point I will give him is that we have a lack of structure in the web. There is too easy to produce information. Nowadays there is so much information that some help in this ocean is needed. I wrote an entry on that the day before I met the co-founder/president Mena Trott and Executive Vice President of Corporate Development Andrew Anker at SixApart that delivers what I think the best blog platform today.

Finally what we need is for the traditional media to start to get involved. As for the author. He needs to start realise that everything is evolving. We can either use to be part of the evolution and influence where it is going. Standing on the side, remembering the good ol’ days and complaining about change will never change anything. It will however bring in a lot of negative energy, which I think this world has too much of already.

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Credibility and copyrights in the new improved media
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In the light of the recent events of the pictures taken by an authorized Reuter’s photographer and the withdrawal of his pictures from the Reuter’s picture archive, it is interesting to take a look at the credibility of any news and information in general too. I have been lucky to browse through the picture archive and I must say that the number of pictures are amazing so is the quality of them. Are they credible and authentic? Not sure.

I have done my fair share of photoshopping and I am aware of the tricks to change pictures and to enhance and improve what you see. This phenomenon has been known in ages in the model environment. We have been spared altered images in the news, images where events have been manipulated to the better, rather than portraying a cruel, less beautiful reality or recently a more cruel reality such as the case of the Reuters photographer. It has also been reports of the Israeli forces.

Maybe we have lived in denial. I don’t know. What I do know is that the blogosphere here fills a crucial need. I have had several discussions lately about the credibility of the new improved media. I have continuously claimed two things:

  • the blogosphere needs to learn from the traditional media about how to handle credibility, filtering and so forth
  • the traditional media on the contrary can use the blogosphere to create and check the credibility as well as the authenticity

This is of course much simplified, but for the sake of the presentation bear with me on the two points. This is something that I think we have to explore more and which I personally am doing presently.

On a slightly related note, some thoughts should be put to who owns the rights of the citizen media reports and especially the photos, audio clips and videos. If the rights to the material are not clear, the publisher will not be able to publish it at all.

Who owns the rights to the content? The sender? The object at the picture? The publisher? What is needed? And so forth.

Unfortunately I do not have a clear or complete answer at this stage and I do think we will just have some faith in the legal work being done. Here at Stanford I have met the director for the freedom of speech institute, which give me great faith in the progress. The most common answer I get is the Creative Common License, which if done properly is certainly a terrific choice. However, what is needed to fulfill the license? Is it enough with a disclaimer? Who knows…

– Come on, Erik. Now you sound too negative!
– I am certainly not. The scenario I am interested in is when you apply these techniques in areas of war and/or less secure areas.

A agree that this is mostly a technology problem to secure the sender as much as possible, but we need some legal protection to secure the source after the information sent in. It brings me over to the prolongation of the argumentation. Who owns the copyright for the material?

I did not think of a solution until a PhD student in Toronto added me on MSN and started to talk about his work. I got intrigued by his work and especially how they solved the copyright issues. We could question whether it is a doable solution on the long term in journalistic applications, but it is definitely an interesting angle.

He was working on something called “sousveillance”, that is the opposite of surveillance –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance. Think of it as people being able to look back at the big brother society and thereby creating a balance. Very interesting thought even though I am still not convinced that more cameras are the true solution to our problem. We can leave that discussion for later though.

However he brought up the idea of “subject rights”. Think of that as the same agreement models do when they are taking their pictures. They are giving away the rights to use their images by a consent form. The same can actually be made for the case of citizen journalistic contributions.

A simple scenario to explain how it could work: Someone takes a picture of you. Who owns the image? The photographer or you? Without a copyright release form the photographer will own the picture. However by making the contributors sign a consent form this can be solved and the copyrights moved to the subject of the report.

This solution is of course filled with complexity, and is really a kind of a blurry area. It is a step in the right direction even though I think that we have to do much more work and there is a need to get some lawyers involved to solve these issues. Yet covering all different legal aspects will be impossible.

Therefore, as I see it the easiest solution now simply is to put some faith in the contributors as well educating them not to violate the privacy laws and other legal issues. It calls for a mechanism to handle the contributions from citizens to ensure that the individual rights are not violated. Briefly, the key is in the review system, which needs to be constructed in a way to be sustainable and easy to use. I have proposed a way to use citizen editors to edit it, and to use the cell phone platform to do so. Here the traditional media can contribute much to implement existing structures they have, yet in a community sense.

I will come back to a better description of the full solution in a later blog entry.

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The sailors and the media
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This rather strange title probably make less sense. However it does. I started to think about the new media and what the purpose of it is. I thought of the following analogy:

Sailors aren’t afraid of storms, they learn to live with them, learn to handle them and/or build better ships. The same can be said about wars. They will come, but we will need to learn how to deal with them.

I am not naïve, but I am as said so many times before optimistic. There is a way.

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Comments on The future of citizen media
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I got some comments on my latest blog. I have mostly gotten positive feedback. However some critical voices have been raised though, who summarized say: “It will never work out. This is just a gimmick.”

My opinion: It will, it should and it must.

I will elaborate shortly on the comments I have gotten over the phone, in emails, on IM and in person. (Especially since one of my closest friends believe I blog too long entries. :) )

Challenge 1: The good guy never wins in wars, because they are naïve.
Does that really mean it is not worth fighting for goodness? We should always jump right into the action. Everyone who knows me knows that is only a matter of time before I bring up the water drops on the stone will always make a hole. I use it to keep the faith that there is a solution.

Challenge 2: Journalists are already able to give this personal view of events.
How many are the journalists and how many are the rest of the world? I know, I know. This is really an unfair comparison. The biggest advantage to use citizens is however that they are everywhere. There is a big need for the news organization to participate in presenting the news as they can via their professional presentation provide it with the credibility needed.

Challenge 3: Seeing the uncensored, unfiltered and unedited view will probably just stir up emotions and is not a force towards peace.
Darn right it will. It should. However, when we see these “reports” whether they are broadcasted on BBC, CNN or on the blog by a private person, we should always start to question what we see, why we see it. Is it the truth? Thinking critical is a responsibility for each citizen. I cannot make it enough clear that the traditional media has a crucial role to play here. They can help the new media learn it lessons, and learn from it.

Before continuing I would like to kill one myth that has come up during my time here at Stanford and my various discussions with different people. Just because a citizen “reports” something does not necessary mean that it is newsworthy. Most of what is written only has news value for you friends and family. There are cases where big things have been brought to the attention by the blogosphere and the new media initiatives. Many of these examples are brought up in the book “We The Media” by Dan Gillmor.

Going on.

Showing pictures of dying wounded, starving and/or suffering people are never fun and seeing the misery will initially stir up more emotions. However the first step towards any change is to understand, and for that you will have to see. See the human perspective, in some form. I guess that she has never heard of the Swedish saying: “After the storm there is always peace and calmness”. Storms will come one after the other, but understanding the storms will help us protect us against it. Another example is found in our human ancient past. Before us as human beings knew how to handle fire, we fought, and feared it. Then we learned that it could be our friend. Now it is an essential part of our life and has played an important part of our society’s development.

We should the possibilities, working towards changing this world to a better place. Obviously there are so many people out there, who are against seeing the pain, who wants to cover it up and against openness. One of my favorite quotes is one by a certain Mr Kierkegaard: “To dare is to loose control for awhile, not to dare is to loose yourself”.

We should remember this. It is easier to hold on to the past than to go on. The path is usually rocky, unclear, narrow and long. But hey I like roller-coasters, thanks to someone really special to me…

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