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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."
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
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.
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...
What I want to see is video from the people involved in protests. That's what this is going to be good for. I don't give a crap what the guy holoding the phone/cam thinks, but it will give me a view of an event the mainstream media might have glossed over. Things are so whitewashed it's ridiculous. Try watching the BBC vs any of the US channels. The US won't show anything that might upset us. That's not really telling the truth, it's just partial truths.
-- taking over the world, we are.
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."
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.