LoookTV

Whether blackbots, comment spam, online propaganda or outright fraudulent blog posting, the internet has a lot of malicious and nefarious forces at work. It seems clear that whitehats out number blackhats but like the political advertising industry, negative influences have an increasing powerful voice in this conversational medium.

Unlike most readers, I’m a huge fan of journalists. It is not that bloggers and various producers of user-generated-content don’t have a place online, I think they do. But I think journalists are a special and very important group of people that unfortunately, for the most part, work for media companies that are out of sync with the online audience. Media companies are where journalists work and pay them to report the news and reporting the news is dramatically different than having an opinion about what’s going on.

Because of social news sites like digg, newsvine, netscape, memeorandum and reddit there are automated editorial strategies and publishing tools that bubble a story up into and out of the news cycle based on the popularity. A robust and powerful meme can gain world wide visibility, approval and support in hours. The wisdom of crowds is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the edge propagates interest and democratizes the “truth” of the story. On the other hand, the systems are being gamed and further…people being people… people are responding to negative points of view with more attention. This has the potential of skewing social news and perhaps propagating the stupidity of crowds led by propagandists and simply angry crowds.

From a meme posted recently on techmeme

Is bias in social media so strong that people will believe anything (as long as it is pro-Apple, or pro-Nintendo, anti-Microsoft, or anti-Sony, and so on…)? This instance does show us that because of community bias, the community may not be a perfect tool for editorial control, but does this allow us to make the case for having professional (hired) editors/moderators on socially driven news sites?

Journalism is about reputation and trusted attention. Journalism is under threat and so is the Power of the Press because of dilution of the responsible reporting online, outsourcing and a variety of issues related to technology and relatioship architecture. Putting aside the potential of spoofing a respected journalist for a moment. Journalists provide an important balance in America and more importantly across the web. They seek to objectively report. The best may have an opinion but readers and viewers acknowledge a reporters bias and there is nothing surreptitious, no hidden agenda, just the best what when where report that journalist can muster. Blogging is not journalism in this sense for the most part. That’s changing. There are bloggers with ethics and standards who check facts and attempt to objectively report but they are a very small fraction of a percent of the blogosphere. Bloggers IMHO are valuable as the contributors to the web’s “Op Ed” pages and can function as valuable fact checkers and witnesses to events. The UCLA library taser incident a perfect case in point.

A journalist interviews, double checks witnesses and gathers parts of the story and atempts to objectively tell the truth, an impossible task. A blogger typically reacts to the emotional horror of the event, judges what they see through the lens of the media and publishes their opinionated voice. These two “news stories” are then circulated and it doesn’t take much imagination to guess which is made more accessible, more “palatible” to the largest part of the audience, which has more emotional power and which has more potential to be swept up in the meme of a social news cycle propelled by automated social news systems like digg, newsvine, netscape and reddit. Now add to this inherent power of blogs, a malicious propagandist and suddenly we might see a River of Lies flowing across our screens.

Social aggregation and weighting of attention in the publishing of news and management of the news cycle has some unintended consequences. Technologists must design with a truer sense of design to move beyond feature development and understand the implications of the function. Innovation being what it is, we’re all learning what the web is. One of the early lessions had to do with raw network effects, now we are encountering social effects. Because so many of us want to build, the explosion of innovation can take us places we haven’t anticipated. Something as powerful as social aggregation needs thought and design. And sometimes we get caught up in a transition from information architecture and relationship architecture.

The 1984 scenario I am most concerned about is a world where ignorant emotion demands control of our attention. Not a world where the government imposes the thought police but where the popularity of propagandists and the stupidity of crowds defines a Brave New World.