Hat tip to Cindy Gibson for sending this along.
Full article in PDF: http://bit.ly/challengesdemomediaPDF Challenges of Democratizing News and Information From: cingib <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 5:06 PM Subject: What Are the Challenges of Democratizing News & Information? Harvard Kennedy School The Challenges of Democratizing News and Information Examining Data on Social Media, Viral Patterns and Digital Influence A new paper by John Wihbey, Managing Editor of Journalist’s Resource, provides a new perspective on the promise that digital technologies and social networks hold for the further democratization of media. >From the Introduction: Our digitally networked world fuels the dream of the democratization of thought, ideas and flows of information. Huge networks underpin the dream. Facebook boasts more than a billion users, Twitter has a quarter-billion. The Sina Weibo microblogging platform in China sees nearly 150 million users a month. Given that Facebook was founded in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, the era of social media is still in its infancy. There are parallels to the periods immediately following the introduction of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in the 19th century, when the full impact of those inventions was not yet clear. Because of the Web, we have seen amazing examples of “nobodies” becoming “somebodies” overnight, of whiplash-fast events arising in previously obscure corners of the world. We witness instances of super-empowered citizens, viral phenomena, and the seemingly instant coordination of protests and celebrations alike. Memes and hashtags zip and proliferate. These are the relative “successes” of the digital age; high-profile instances of a democratizing system are frequently the points of emphasis when we talk about the rise of the Web. We seldom discuss the failures and what, on balance, has not changed. But there has been a simmering counter-narrative, one articulated mostly in academic circles and largely ignored in popular discourse. Worries have been mounting for some time about the online world’s capacity to change traditional dynamics of access and inequality around news and information. Citizens may have more pathways to engage with and produce important content, but that does not mean they will use them — or that they will be powerful within these pathways. On the Web an attention arms race is clearly at hand. A “power law” still characterizes how attention is distributed, despite the capacity for open networks to distribute it more equitably, and for more people to focus on diverse sources. There are a few significant winners and many millions who struggle to garner much attention at all. In his 2008 book The Myth of Digital Democracy, Matthew Hindman of George Washington University shows that the readership of political postings is “orders of magnitude more unequal than the disparities we are used to in voting, volunteer work and even political fund-raising.” Further, by some measures, “online audience concentration equals or exceeds that found in most traditional media.”[i] These dynamics affect people and organizations of all kinds across the Web. For example, a 2014 study by Trevor Thrall and Diana Sweet of George Mason University and Dominik Stecula of the University of British Columbia analyzed the efforts of 257 human rights organizations to get wider media and general online attention. Because of the “zero-sum nature of public attention,” most human rights groups get little media publicity; instead, news coverage heavily favors a few larger organizations with greater resources. And on the Web, the same thing happens: Organizations compete for audience attention through social media. Among the groups studied, the top 10 percent of human rights organizations accounted for 90 percent of YouTube views, 81 percent of Facebook likes and 92 percent of Twitter followers.[ii] Still, the information ecosystem overall has changed, as more small publishers have been created. As Internet theorist and Harvard University scholar Yochai Benkler pointed out in his 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks, the system of mutual linking among tight clusters of less-known bloggers and commentators can form an “attention backbone” and build pathways for interesting ideas and statements to find broader audiences. This is part of what Benkler has called the “networked public sphere” and “networked Fourth Estate.”[iii] Some research indicates that dominant, elite positions within the blogosphere are relatively transient; the masses thus democratically “elect” top blogs with views and clicks.[iv] Likewise, a Twitter hashtag can create an attention backbone, empowering otherwise less-known, less powerful individuals. More than any prior technology, social media have the possibility of driving this democratization of information even further, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. There are many ways to assess this issue. One way is to examine carefully how people get their news. Another is to look precisely and empirically at how information is flowing across social networking sites and how human behavior may be changing because of this. This paper brings together media industry data and perspective — from NPR, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal — with a growing body of social science and computational research produced by universities and firms such as Microsoft Research and the Facebook data science team, as well as survey findings from the Pew Research Center. The bulk of the evidence so far complicates any easy narrative, and it very much remains an open question if we can expect a more radically democratized media ecosystem, despite promising early trends and anecdotes. As I review the evidence, I aim to highlight lessons and insights that can help those thinking about and operating in the social media space. I also hope this paper serves as an accessible survey of relevant topics within social science, social network and media scholarship. Read the full paper (PDF). http://bit.ly/challengesdemomediaPDF Journalist’s Resource is a project of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. ________________________________ [i] Hindman, Matthew. The Myth of Digital Democracy. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 17. [ii] Thrall, Trevor; Stecula, Dominik; Sweet, Diana. “May We Have Your Attention Please? Human-Rights NGOs and the Problem of Global Communication.” International Journal of Press/Politics, 2014. doi: 10.1177/1940161213519132. Available at: http://hij.sagepub.com/content/19/2/135. [iii] Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2006). [iv] Nahon, Karine; et al. “Blogs: Spinning a Web of Virality,” Proceedings of the 2011 iConference. doi: 10.1145/1940761.1940809. 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