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Rheingold Preaches Mob-Logging
drjparker writes "Howard Rheingold author of Smart Mobs and The Virtual Community among other works has an article in the Online Journalism Review in which he ponders the effects of video over cell phones and adding video to blogs on the future of journalism. The article is titled Moblogs Seen as a Crystal Ball for a New Era in Online Journalism."
I read about 3 paragraphs of this story before I felt like puking. Mob-logging? It's sad watching these old, insecure guys like Rheingold (and lately, Tim O'Reilly) try to stay relevant. Pathetic. OK, mod me flamebait, but it's true.
Slashdot is the future of news. We are doomed to see tubgirl and goatse. Trolls will dominate the newscape. Although the moderators will save us.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Somehow I don't see mob-blogging as the 'new media' nor "Putting video cameras and high-speed Net connections in telephones, moves blogging into the streets."
I think that the media will remain the same, if not more powerful due to the vast quantity of information being provided to people; would you rather siphon through 100 people's random news (crap important to them but not you) vs. getting the quick and dirty (www.cnn.com, news.google.com) ?
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
Moblogs: Complete with popups that will make you an offer you CAN'T refuse!
My journal has hot
I'm sorry but all I see is a new era/avenue in the world of porn. Now you can call the 1-800 #'s and view some skank(tm) showing you her goods in public. This could be true voyeurism. You could call a 1-800# and tell the skank(tm) what to do. I would tell the skank(tm) to undress and jump the first homeless guy she sees but make sure to keep the phone on the action.
1-800-phn-sknk
I'm sure the live phone cam upskirt cams are coming too. I bet they'll be tied to websites with a meta refresh of 2 seconds or less as an attempt to make it a poor man's video.
I wonder how advertisers will exploit this?
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
Does this mean we'll soon have to watch video clips of the editors posting stories or chrisd pondering the next poll?
Better still, does this mean that we'll soon be able to immerse ourselves in 24/7, live CowboyNeal?
Posting as directed.
It seems like a good thing without giving too much thought at the moment.
This is a good thing for places where media censorship occurs regularly. The SARS crisis could not be contained by the Chinese government because of people sending SMS's to others with tales of a disease spreading in certain areas. The news of course didn't cover it, and when China finally acknowledged it, the news down played it. But the SMS's continued, and it gave people a way to do first hand accounts of an event in progress.
If this can prevent media censorship, I'm all for it.
But then... who's to say some group won't stage some sort of event in the future and use/force people to blog this to mislead others...
I for one can't wait for the Götterdammerung that will result from this one.
sulli
RTFJ.
Sure all these people will be bringing different perspectives to what's going on in the world, but along with it they may bring prejudices and narrow viewpoints along with it. These are things we try to avoid in accurate journalism. Not everyone is going to care about bringing every side of the story, they may just show their opinion (bias) in order to persuade others. This is already happening today and encouraging everyone, no matter if they lack experience, objectivity, proper reporting skills, to be a reporter may not be a good idea. So, the question is, is the future going to have news distribution in the hands of everyone, even considering how difficult it is at the moment to find accurate information on the internet? Everyone has the right to show their opinion, but I do not expect this type of journalism to become as revolutionary as the article implies.
I don't see this as a big revolution. There are allready millions of people who don't travel anywhere without their camcorder. For the sake of news worthiness video will still have to go through a review process to ensure authenticity, accuracy, whatever. Plus is the quality going to afford the images to be used for news events? Is the clarity and size even available from phones? If anything this will generate a whole boat-load of new short clips for the real-life-video shows that abound. Not that seeing people do stupid stuff isn't entertaining; there is just so much allready that I don't think another new media will make that much of a difference. -my $0.02
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
the real problem here is that none of these "mobloggers" is going to have the money to be free to just report news all day. it is the job of "real" reporters to just find news, all day, seven days a week. if you're busy driving to work and earning a buck, you aren't free to only produce news. who has time to check sources/etc.? i'm sure other slashdotters will mention the fact that since there is no real moderation on individual blogs, getting decent news from these sites will also be a time consuming, tedious task. i look forward to seeing solutions to these problems.
So Journalism becomes aggregated rumor and mobthought? Thanks but no thanks.
While there are certainly problems with current Journalism (see New York Times, and the rush for all networks to become like Fox News in the wake of Iraq) I still like knowing where my news comes from and having some entity to hold responsible for the coverage.
Individual testimonials and stories have their place too, but the people on the street have their own axes to grind as much as the media does and do not as frequently distinguish between fact and rumor. (How many idiots on the internet will scream "Bush is a Coke-Head" or "Clinton had people murdered!" like it's gospel)
Journalism is in enough trouble with corporate consolidation and deregulation, but this is too much.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Yup, thing just keep getting better... now we get to see pictures from peoples' monotonous lives as well as reading their whining. Don't the future sound grand?
deserve's got nothing to do with it...
>> Rheingold Preaches Mob-Logging
Is he preacing Mob-Logging?
Or does he just want Mo-Blogging?
Slashdot is a real big success story. The moderation system makes sure I see only at least remotely relevant or funny stuff.
Now checkout tv.oneworld.net
that already does quite cool stuff with short videos uploaded by virtually anyone.If both are combined I could really imagine this to be useful. Imagine something like slashdot where editors select stories. Everybody would then sortof upload their clips that would get moderated. I dont see why this should not be possible.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
I propose calling'em "phrakers".
Jesus, people, get a clue. The whole frickin' article is about the emergent problem of journalistic credibility vs. moblogging.
Blogs, RSS syndication, RSS aggregators, metablogs and reputation systems like Technorati and NewsMonster now offer a dynamic and rapidly evolving collective editorial filtering system.
His entire thesis is that the emerging moblogging culture will need to put safeguards into place, like reputation systems. He's not talking about aggregating rumor or mobthought, but the need for mechanisms to sift the wheat from the chaff so that you have rapidly emerging, true information without a paid editorial staff.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds alot like Open Source Journalism, collectively written and peer-reviewed.
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
I think the term is moblogging ("moe-blogging") as in mobile weblogging. It's a little confusing in that it talks about mobs of people using mobile devices. You can follow the link to the origin of the word.
Rheingold gives us more of his simplistic technological determinism and poorly researched and non-empirical ideas.
So what? A group of people read his work and then actually rush to be the first to wet their pants as he can name them as actually implementing his ideas!?! How lame is that?
Much more interesting would be a book that actually analysed how the media corporations will use this technology in embedding at a lower level than already shown in the Gulf War. This was perhaps the most potent demonstration of how technology allows us to see everything in real time, but as we are overwhelmed we don't critique, we don't listen and it becomes purely background entertainment.
For instance in the Gulf War lots was happening in Basra and on the Baghdad Rd, we knew that as there were so many Embeds. BUT what exactly were the US and Brits up to in Western Iraq and Northern Iraq where the Embeds were forbidden (or perhaps persuaded) not to go? We will never know as we were all so sick of footage from the 'media' bit of Iraq that we truly couldn't be bothered to find out...
That is the power of moblogs... Control through information overload... coming soon...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Maybe I'm alone, maybe I'm not, but I've never visited a blog on a regular basis, unless the blog is in front of something else that I want, I probably wouldn't ever see one. So, maybe you can help me out? Where do I even begin looking for useful/meaningful blogs?
To me, I hear all about blogs, but have never ever found an interesting or useful one. Come to think of it, I haven't even seen that many. So maybe there's an index I'm missing? Or maybe I need to get more saavy friends?! whatever.
It seems like blogs and their importance are all hype.
Indymedia has been doing this kind of stuff for years. Its a network of websites where people upload multimedia news content. It started off as an event based thing around protests (Seattle '99) but has grown into a network of over 100 sites worldwide, that try to provide community news coverage on an ongoing basis.
For most of the coverage is not done live, ie people take pictures, video, etc and then go back home or to a community media center and then upload it. There have been a wide variety of live wireless strategies used including:
- internet radio stream with live callins via cellphone (most popular)
- phone cams
- sms gateway
- onsite kiosk provided via 3G phone, for picture upload, live chat
- live 802.11b video streaming
Since Seattle '99 thousands of a/v clips, tens of thousands of photos and hundreds of thousands of text articles have been contributed to this collaborative news platform.
We've done some stuff with syndication of our content but the protocols don't exist yet to fully exchange multimedia content.
One thing that I think Indymedia has that blog culture doesn't is that its not "just a website". The websites function to allow anyone to participate but that's generally not thought to be sufficient. Each of the 100+ nodes in the network has a group of people that work to cultivate a liberated media space by doing things like provide training on how to do multimedia and reporting, holds film showings, provides technical support, publish newspapers, etc.
I work with DC Indymedia.
As I have stated here before, to be considered "journalism", trust of the source is a required characteristic. Rheingold himself makes this point:
"Journalism, if it is to deserve the name, is not about the quality of the camera, but about the journalist's intuition, integrity, courage, inquisitiveness, analytic and expressive capabilities, and above all, the trust the journalist has earned among readers."
Whether we call it journalism or not, we all participate in communities of trusted information. We talk with our friends and family about politics, co-workers about innovations in technology, etc. Who we choose to believe or listen to within these groups is based upon how much we trust the other party. The so-called democratization of journalism is nothing more than the globalization of the chat around the water-cooler.
Improvements in technology will not improve the quality of the content (in fact, it will probably bias it towards the prurient and salacious), but it does increase the pool of potential reporters. While we will undoubtedly see the rise of individuals that draw a devoted gathering (ala Matt Drudge), the "traditional" media sources will continue to be important as reliable, trusted sources.
The problem with the camera phones and such, as they presently exist, is interception. The government already has the infrastructure to monitor your mobile phone's calls and messages. When something happens, it'll be very easy to see which subversive free-thinkers are sending pictures of the event. Forget about having anything like the Zapruder film next time something big happens. Accounts of the event will be instantly censored for quick coverup by big brother.
For blogging to be useful for any news more controversial than your pet's latest chew-toy, we need a mechanism for censorship resistance. Communications between phones and internet hosts should be strongly encrypted, and users should be able to choose anonymity for publishing sensitive material.
Freenet is nearly perfect for this. It's a little too bulky for the current generation of Java-capable phones, but in a year or two we should see handsets with very powerful JVMs. Freenet 'blogs, or flogs, will become increasingly important as awareness of government eavesdropping increases. Being able to update a flog and instantly add pictures, right from your phone at the scene of an event, will vastly improve the reporting of important news. At the moment this would require carrying a laptop, which is not only bulky, it's conspicuous.
Bloggers need to embrace Freenet en masse, to secure their right to uncensored, optionally anonymous publication and communication. If you could say anything at all, what would you publish? You can, please do.
While the panelists agreed that blogging and moblogging doesn't automatically qualify as journalism, they did say that it CAN be journalism if journalistic principles are applied.
One of the more interesting comments was from technology journalist David Akin, who said that experiments that enlist moblogging citizens with camera phones to send their photos to news sites may be cool and fun and interesting, but it's not news by longshot, mainly because they lack the professional journalistic skills to identify what qualifies as news.
it's a riff on Der Ring des Nibelungen by Richard Wagner. The four parts are Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdammerung.
sulli
RTFJ.