Category: Technology
Are we the same people online as we are offline?
Hello. This is a post from the online Joseph Stashko. He’s perceptive, diligent and occasionally amusing. The online Joseph doesn’t bother anyone with moaning about his train being late, or getting a flat tyre on his bike. He hopes that he doesn’t inflict his irritating personality traits on the online audience, and while some of his shit-fits may occasionally make their way onto Facebook, he’s more or less a productive member of online communities.
Enough of writing in the third person. The concept I’m trying to explore is that often we present idealised versions of ourselves online. Far from being transparent, online activity can be restricted to the aspects of our personality we’d want people to admire us for rather than the more unsavoury traits. I sense that this because of two main reasons, the first being our own behaviour, and the second being the nature of the web.
People love to reinvent themselves. You see it when they join a new school, start university, begin a new job or enter a new social circle. It provides an opportunity to start afresh and to present yourself as an apotheosis of the person you’d like to be seen as.
The web can be seen as the embodiment of this type of behaviour. Each time we sign up to a new account online we are presented with a blank canvas onto which we illustrate with broad brush strokes a painting of our personalities from scratch. There’s no history and no secrets from the past. In essence, we get the chance to begin our digital life in the way we wish our real lives played out, with all the positives and none of the negatives, and who’d blame us? It’s rare that we ever experience anything that isn’t tainted by people’s preconceptions and personal prejudices. Our online counterparts discard this and present platonic conceptions of ourselves.
Some aspects of the web also encourage this type of behaviour by being so nice. As I glance through Twitter, I’m always confronted with a chumminess and a sense of camaraderie.
If people are only tweeting things seen through the prism of what they believe to be their admirable personality traits, then an artificial environment is created in which anyone saying anything untoward is deemed to be dour or unsavoury. It’s an unspoken fallacy that we should all be joyful and happy all the time, and empathise with everything we see. How can that possibly be realistic? Facebook’s lack of a “dislike” button confirms this. We are only able to “like” things or remain gracefully silent. There is no option to express disagreement.
Maybe those people who do are just more human? That’s the key here. It’s human to mess things up. Being callous, selfish and flawed are key human traits. I can count on two hands the people I know who act the same offline as they do online. Maybe that’s because they’re better communicators, and maybe people’s decision to upgrade their personalities online isn’t a conscious one. But logically following this argument, Twitter and online interaction can be fairly dehumanising, rendering us as broadly similar people, identikit vignettes on the tapestry of the web.
The open access and ability to judge people on their actions rather than their history means that people like Josh Halliday get a job with the Guardian. It means that people have been aware of my hyperlocal work. But who’s to say that there isn’t someone in a similar position to me, doing the same or better work but getting no recognition for it? I’m broadcasting things that I’m engaged in, because that’s the productive aspect of my personality. Who’s to say that if I stopped doing that and instead tweeted about my breakfast then people would stop taking notice of my work? Would that make my work any less valid or relevant? If a journalist writes an article and no one is around to read it, does it exist?
For my part, I’d rather inject more personality into my online persona, even if that means I annoy a few people along the way. If we disagree on the basis of links I post or beliefs that I hold, it’s unlikely that we’d get on in real life either. Far from wanting to be a deliberate polemiscist, I’d much prefer to have healthy disagreement and discourse that’s based on my true beliefs, and not just selective elements.
Does reading what you retweet matter?
In the media, a select few are followed on Twitter by thousands because they’re deemed to have expertise in some area or just have a useful and entertaining online presence.
Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say these people act as a hegemony, people like Paul Bradshaw, Jay Rosen and Jeff Jarvis have people waiting on their every word, waiting to see what new bit of information they’ll come up with or link to. What this inevitably means is that when a Twitter institution (any of the previously mentioned or say, Poynter, journalism.co.uk or Nieman Lab) posts something new it’s instantly subject to a flurry of retweets within a short space of time, as well as in the days after.
Unfortunately if you follow people within a very specific area of interest you are inevitably faced with the same link appearing in your feed over and over again. Irritating but unavoidable and understandable.
So why do I think you should read what you retweet? Because all too often, I don’t think people do. I think some people retweet things because they’re seeking a boost in popularity, hoping that other people will follow suit and follow them due to their “recommendation”. I think there’s also a herd mentality of following what is deemed to be quality content and what one really believes to be quality content.
Is it ok to pass on information without reading it? Is a retweet an endorsement, or simply a statement of “here’s something to read”? I think the answer can be found by what you think Twitter is for, which broadly falls into two camps.
It’s an information provider. Twitter themselves don’t believe it to be a social network. Kevin Thau, Twitter’s VP for business and corporate development said that “Twitter is for news. Twitter is for content. Twitter is for information”. If you believe in this, then retweet away at your hearts content. There’s no need to read what you’re reposting, because in this case the user acts as a middle man between the source and the extended audience that’s gained by the retweet. It’s just passing on the flow of information.
Or, you think Twitter is a recommendation service. This is the side I tend to lead towards more. Which Twitter streams do I find interesting? Whose links am I likely to click? Not automated ones from news organisations. Blogs, photos and videos posted by more human users are what I’m drawn to. And if they preface a link to a Guardian article with “This is a great article because it addresses x and x” then I’m more likely to use it. Retweeting without reading is baffling to me. It’s like handing someone a book saying “this is very good. I haven’t read it, but the author is famous, so it must be good”.
Personal recommendation is the crux of an online social service. Without it, Twitter would more or less be an RSS feed, albeit with marginally more personality. It’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed using Goodreads so much since I signed up. I can see what all my friends are reading, why they chose to read it, and what they thought of the book afterwards. It’s a tangible recommendation service and it allows me think about what books I’d like to read next.
The more people you follow on Twitter, the more noise there is. So personalities actually shine through. I don’t want to read a link that sounds like it was posted by a machine. I want to see people, and characters. Otherwise, we’re in danger of losing sight of what the point of it all is.
Why 2011 “should” be a great year for young journalists
I don’t know anything about the future of news.
I don’t know what journalism will look like in 10 years, and I don’t know who’ll pay for it. I don’t know if I’ll be employed in the media, and I don’t know what’ll happen to big news organisations.
But then, dear reader, neither do you.
For decades, newspapers and media organisations have been built on mantras like “we know best”.
In My Trade, Andrew Marr describes the ludicrous and fantastical scene where seniors at the pre-Murdoch Times take it in turns to translate the front page first into Latin, then ancient Greek, then back into English, comparing it with the final page, and noting any inconsistencies. Journalism was in an age where the job actually did live up the idyll that you see in films and literature. Heavy drinking and smoking, excitement and investigation; the job was more like an episode of Mad Men than anything today.
I’m using Marr as an example because personal foibles and irritation aside, his book is actually a brilliant study of how a young journalist used to start out. A plucky young man attempting to break into a world that is as established as the world of politics. Everyone knows their place, and everyone senior knows more than you.
As we enter the second decade of the millenium, one can conclude that this status quo has fundamentally changed. You have trainee journalists who are doing much more exciting and relevant things than their paid up industry counterparts. Young journalists are on the whole more digitally savvy, enthusiastic and willing to play fast and loose with tradition. Granted, things like accuracy, awareness of the law and a nose for news should never change. But just because something is an established norm doesn’t mean it isn’t total crap.
You hear the same thing all the time from journalism educators and occassionally employers: New journalists need to be multi-platform savvy, have an awareness of social media and believe in putting the readers first, not an ego.
Based on this theory, new graduates who tick these boxes should have no problem getting a job. The old world of print journalism is passing into the history books, replaced by content-generating users and everyone who makes up the globalised, digitised public sphere in the 21st century, right?
Well, sort of. There’s still a gigantic disconnect between how journalism is moving forward and many executives’ idea of how it should be. One thing that digital media has taught us is that journalists don’t have all the answers, that we’re frequently intellectually outclassed by our readers, who not only correct us but are happy to do so because it gives them the sense of being part of a more equal relationship between publisher and consumer. Some news dinosaurs still seem to think that ploughing away at copy is the be all and end all, and damn anyone who wants to made a snide aside in the comment section. After all, it’s only the internet.
This is worrying because it often seems to be a case of news organisations not practicing what they preach. Are innovative people consistently getting hired, or are employers still ploughing avenues of predictability? Of course you need traditional journalistic values in a 21st century newsroom, but for once the people being recruited at entry level know about how to adapt to the news landscape just as well as the people above them.
I’d even go as far in arguing that graduates are capable of knowing far more than their employer when it comes to how to approach modern news distribution. They don’t have the stigma and knowledge of the old way of doing things; this is a generation that has almost grown up entirely in the social culture of news and is glad of it. They’re selfless about their work, they want to listen to and engage their readers and produce exciting content.
Young bucks aren’t as experienced as the hack who’s been at the paper 40 years. They will probably make mistakes, piss off online commenters and occasionally be very naive. But in an industry that’s as jaded and cynical as the day is long, it could do with an optimistic shot in the arm from young upstarts.
2011 should be great if you’re the right side of 25.