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Cross-posted at my web site.

For the past few years, I’ve been researching the field of citizen journalism (you can read a bit about our project here). For the current paper I’m working on with UMN sociology grad student and jazz saxophone beast Ryan Larson, we’re looking at changes in the organizational population of citizen journalism (CJ) sites over time. In other words, we’re asking: how many CJ sites are there? And how has that changed over time? Then, we discuss some important social and historical forces that may have contributed to it.

One of the factors that I wonder about is the public’s interest. There’s a substantial academic literature on CJ that just keeps growing, but how interested in CJ are normal people? This afternoon, I decided to give it a quick-and-dirty look. I used three sources of Google-powered data. First, I tracked the number of Google Scholar references to the exact phrase “citizen journalism” over time (that’s the yellow line). Second, I used Google’s Ngram, which searches for references in the vast collection of books archived in Google Books (available through 2007). The number presented in the double blue lines is percentage of books each year with a reference to “citizen journalism” presented in 10 millionths of a percentage. Finally, the dotted gray line is search volume data from Google Trends (available from 2006 on). It’s a normalized interest index that is relative not absolute and varies from 1-100. I averaged the monthly values to produce annual scores.

A few important things jump out. One is that “citizen journalism” as a term essentially didn’t exist before 2002. That said, the practice of CJ, ordinary people gathering and reporting news, is actually older than having professional journalists who report the news. It took academics until about 2004 to start writing about CJ in large numbers, but, man, are we pumped about it now! In 2014, almost 2,000 sources in Google Scholar mentioned “citizen journalism.” Though the books data only go through 2007, they seem to be running slightly ahead of articles, but follow the same trajectory.

As for the public, the big finding since 2006 is a dramatic decline in search volume. What does this mean? Is the public less interested in CJ? Are they using different terms to describe the same practice? Or are they turning to Twitter and Facebook rather than Google to locate it? I think all of the above are possible. The chart does make me wonder if citizen journalism is a trend that is more meaningful to media and academic elites than to the general public.

So, did citizen journalism rise and fall without the academy noticing? Stayed tuned for our paper.

Cross-posted on my web site.

Most Americans get their news from local TV news programs. While TV news does a fine job with “Local Boy and Lost Dog Reunited” stories, where they often fall short is on stories that require more than a cursory rundown of the day’s events. So, what most Americans saw when they tuned in to the local newscasts this week was a story about wild and irrational rioters in Baltimore looting and destroying their city.

Of course, today, the news ecosystem is a lot bigger than just TV and, in some ways, the Internet offered promising alternative coverage. Those following hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter were reminded that these riots spring forth from a context of persistent police violence against black residents, including Freddie Gray who died after suffering a spinal cord injury while in police custody. On web-based news startup sites, including Vox.com, we were reminded that half of the residents of Freddie Gray’s neighborhood don’t have jobs. On his blog, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out that calls for nonviolence and “calm” among protesters are not matched with similar condemnations of violence by police in daily encounters with black residents.

On my own Facebook feed, several friends shared research findings that note rates of incarceration of black men by orders of magnitude higher than any country in the world, failing schools in poor neighborhoods, and inadequate access to healthy food and even clean water in urban black communities. One friend shared a classic academic article called “The Diffusion of Collective Violence” by Daniel Meyers that explains how urban riots grow.

All of these web-based media provide precisely what’s missing from local TV news: the sort of sociological and economic context necessary to understand the events in Baltimore. But then again, many of my Facebook friends are college professors who do things like share data on social media. Elsewhere on the web, it was easy to find openly racist commentary on the Baltimore protesters, but also decent, open-minded, white people who don’t understand why recent issues with police amount to more than a few bad apples.

The Internet is a democratizing force that gives many more people the opportunity to express themselves – and that’s a double-edged sword.

Media scholars have long observed the danger of the Internet to act as an echo chamber where the likeminded speak to the likeminded. As a consequence, Internet news may provide desperately needed context, but it’s unlikely to reach those who need to hear it in order to stand for real justice.

The protests turned violent in Baltimore are borne of years of economic and social deprivation, institutional racism, and police brutality towards people of color. In the mainstream news media, it’s all too easy to miss that context. In the public sphere offered by the Internet, we risk preaching to the choir. If we are to achieve any measure of social change and reconciliation, we must deliberately engage with ideas and evidence that could lead us to change our minds.

It’s a truism that the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in the 1960s because TV cameras captured the violence against nonviolent protesters. The current movement against police brutality has gained steam, in part, because of smartphone videos uploaded to the web. As much as media has brought public attention to issues of racial injustice, neither the mainstream news model nor the web-based model are fully equipped to promote understanding and social change. As news consumers, we need to demand insight, not mere updates from traditional news outlets. As neighbors and citizens, we need to push ourselves to learn more, have hard conversations with those we disagree with, and develop greater empathy for each other.

I’ve spent the day reading journal articles, both popular and academic, about the political importance of twitter.

Twitter has grown so precipitously in the last few years because it resolves the “problem of voice” in many societies. Put simply, we all want to be heard, but we don’t know how to articulate what we believe, see or experience or we don’t have the megaphone to put those perceptions out to the mass public.

By giving you a medium that, in its architecture, allows you to quickly and effectively proclaim yourself, Twitter provides a way to “talk to the world” by allowing you to follow or be followed by a vast number of people. It is broadcasting in a way that Facebook isn’t, since it is based on social proximity. In addition, Twitter’s 140 character limit forces you to be pithy. The economy of words, as Orwell or Hemmingway would attest, increases the impact of the narrative being presented.

Whereas Blogs or Facebook are roundhouses, Twitter is a quick jab. But as fans of boxing know, the accumulation of jabs can be very effective in setting up the big punch. Hashtags allow a barrage of jabs to breakthrough the attention economy, by allowing the accumulation of voices in one package.

But does this mass expression of voice change anything. The jabs have to be followed up with something more substantial. It requires an organizational infrastructure that can build upon the agenda setting success of a viral hashtag campaign to mobilize voters, raise money or pressure elected officials.

This part of “hashtag activism” is not well understood. How does Twitter modify or subvert the traditional policy making process? Agenda setting has always been a part of this process, but new technology is impacting it in poorly understood ways.

On this morning’s The Today Show, the nation’s second place intellectually-barren morning fear-mongerer, Matt Lauer pointed out that the debate over same-sex marriage is far from settled with 36% of Americans opposing it. Conservative activists have made similar arguments, noting that whatever the polls might say, ballot measures reveal a higher degree of opposition to marriage equality. As Gary Bauer told Fox News Sunday:

“I’m not worried about it, because the polls are skewed. Just this past November, four states, very liberal states, voted on this issue and my side lost all four of those votes. But my side had 45, 46 percent of the vote in all four of those liberal states.”

In a WashPost blog post titled
“Is support for gay marriage oversold?“, Aaron Blake and Scott Clement summarize the work of political scientist Patrick Egan who finds that due to social desirability issues in polling and greater election turn-out by conservative activists, polling results do, in fact, underestimate opposition to same-sex marriage.

But I’m not worried. Whatever the Supreme Court may decide, in the long-term, public opinion is solidly on the side of justice. As Sarah Kliff demonstrates on Workblog, demographic trends strongly favor advocates for same-sex marriage. Beyond demographics, there may be some institutional reasons to believe expect greater acceptance of same-sex marriage in the future.

Why?

1) Attitudes evolve. We all know about President Obama’s “evolution” on the issue of same-sex marriage, but, to a great extent, the rest of the country has followed suit. As seen below, every single age group has grown more supportive of same-sex marriage in the past ten years and particularly in the last four. Since 2000, according to Pew Research, support in my Grandma’s generation has grown from 21% to 31%. That’s huge! As several charts on Kliff’s post reveal, one of the best predictors of supporting same-sex marriage is knowing that a friend or family member is gay. With greater numbers of Americans coming out, we would expect more attitudes to “evolve.”

2) Old people oppose same-sex marriage. But old people die. Among people born since 1981, support for same-sex marriage is currently 70%. Even a majority of Republicans under 30 support same-sex marriage.

3) Radical Professors and the Liberal Media. Sometimes Fox News gets it right. My Facebook feed, composed almost entirely of college students, college graduates, and Professors, is red as hell today with the Human Rights Campaign Marriage Equality sign. While surveys of professors are few and far between, one survey of Constitutional Law Professors found 87% support same-sex marriage. While sociology certainly skews Left, I suspect the academy as a whole is more support of marriage equality than the country. Likewise, though many media depictions of gays and lesbians are deeply stereotypical, there’s no question that industry elites who produce TV, movies, and print publications tend to favor same-sex marriage. As former New York Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent once wrote, “The [New York] Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading … That’s all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.” With popular shows like “Modern Family” and “Glee” offering favorable depictions of healthy same-sex relationships alongside positive examples of same-sex couples in Amazon Kindle and JC Penny commercials, the mass media increasingly paints a picture of life in same-sex relationships that is unthreatening. While there are any number of examples of homophobia in the academy and the mass media both are agents of socialization that largely favor same-sex marriage. To bastardize Marx, as go elites, so goes the nation.

4) Same-sex marriage exists (and things are okay) in big, growing states. Sixteen percent of Americans live in states with marriage equality and if Prop 8 is overturning, it will jump to 28%. And, taken together, the states with marriage equality are growing faster than those without it. More of the population will be living alongside married same-sex couples and it will become plain that the reality of same-sex marriages is as unexciting and mundane as opposite-sex marriages.

These are among the reasons that marriage equality is not a question of “if,” but “when?” What other reasons should we add to this list?

Perhpas one of the Internet’s biggest paradoxes is between its ability to foster voice for those who might otherwise not be heard in society and the dangers that result from developing and presenting that voice to others. The tragic story of Kiki Kannibal, a Florida teen who recieved numerous threats and abuse from her provocative on-line profile, serves as a prime example of the challenges present in “putting oneself out there.”

On the other hand, Emily Nussbaum has a great piece in New York Magazine about the blogosphere as a vibrant space for a new generation of feminists. The feminist blogosphere has created a discourse space where young women are able to develop their identity as feminists and engage with ideas and, on occasion, mobilize against mysoginistic practices.

Somewhere embedded in this paradox is the issue of ownership of one’s personal presentation or the ability to be seen for who you think you are. While this is never guaranteed, more can be done in terms of ensuring that making snap judgments about people because of their on-line persona is limited. Helen Nisselbaum urges us to think of privacy on-line as being able to maintain contextual integrity or the extent to which information about a person is seen in relation to other relevant data.

Frank Pasquale recommends developing a system of governmental reputation regulation. Germany’s recent legislation prohibiting employers from using Facebook profiles to deny employment is a prime example of such regulation.

While this might address formal discrimination based on the misuse of on-line data, it doesn’t address the psychological harm of cyberbullying. Already we’re witnessing a ramped-up public service campaign designed to change norms around cyberbullying. Groups like stopcyberbullying.org are working to raise awareness about the harm that cyberbullying does. But these efforts need to be part of a broader campaign to teach digital ethics. To move people away from the idea that the on-line space is “a world apart” from their off-line lives.

I’m 42 and an Internet scholar. I feel like the oldest of fogies when I begin talking to young people about how “the Internet is changing everything.” Yesterday I felt a hind of old timer solidarity listending to a podcast converstaion between two of my favorite comedians. Tom Scharpling, host of The Best Show on WFMU (my favorite podcast) was a guest on comedian Mark Maron’s WTF show (my other favorite podcast) and the conversation turned to the Internet. I’m paraphrasing here a bit:

Scharpling: It is a very bad thing to have a 4(?) on your age… you’ve seen three lifetimes worth of changes in 20 years, and it’s the wrong 20 years to grow up in….

Maron: The world was analog and now it’s digital

Scharpling: a kid whose growing up with these things now, it just informs the world and that’s it. You can’t be 20 and writing a letter to somebody and then 20 years later the whole world is turned upside down…

Maron: now there’s 100 letters you have to process every day. Part of your daily routine is like half a year!

The truth is that the information deluge they discuss is the tip of the iceberg. Take the idea of the social graph, or a global mapping of relationships. In Internet terms, a map of relationships is invaluable for targeting advertising. The Pinboard blog has a perfect description of it:

Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers – that’s the social graph.

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Here’s how Facebook intends to use the social graph…

Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You’ll turn on your TV, and you’ll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching “Entourage,” and that your parents taped “60 Minutes” for you. You’ll buy a brand-new phone, and you’ll just enter your credentials. All your friends—and perhaps directions to all the places you and they have visited recently—will be right there.

For a 40 something like me, this is jarring. The amount of data collected on me through my Internet activity gets process through my formative experiences. For for today’s students, this is water to fish. This example creeps me out:

Austrian law student Max Schrems, because European law states that citizens can do this, requested all the data Facebook had about him. He got back a CD with 1,222 PDF files

I don’t know if it creeps out 20 somethings. I’m not even sure if it should?

I’m teaching Internet and Politics for the first time since 2009.  When I taught the course then, I was filled with optimism about the transformational potential of the Web.  I assigned folks like Henry Jekins, Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, each in their own way preaching a gospel of societal salvation through the web (or at least a possibility of it), be it through convergence culture, free culture, or the networked information economy.  But in 2012, this approach to teaching the course seems naively quaint.  It’s not as if these authors were oblivious to the dangers of rationalization and centralization of the web, but each framed control over the Web as an open question.  It seems much less of that to me…. Maybe that’s why Lawrence Lessig has moved on to study money in politics.

In his 2010 book, The Master Switch, Tim Wu captures the sense that the open Web is your father’s web, or at least your older brother’s web:

Without exception, the brave new technologies of the twentieth century—free use of which was originally encouraged, for the sake of further invention and individual expression—eventually evolved into privately controlled industrial behemoths, the “old media” giants of the twenty-first,through which the flow and nature of content would be strictly controlled for reasons of commerce.

Not that there’s anything wrong with commerce.  But as Jaron Lanier skillfully points out, who makes money off of the Internet anymore?

Every few decades, a new communications technology appears, bright with promise and possibility. It inspires a generation to dream of a better society,new forms of expression, alternative types of journalism. Yet each newtechnology eventually reveals its flaws, kinks, and limitations. For consumers,the technical novelty can wear thin, giving way to various kinds of dissatisfaction with the quality of content (which may tend toward the chaotic and the vulgar) and the reliability or security of service. From industry’s perspective, the invention may inspire other dissatisfactions: a threat to the revenues of existing information channels that the new technology makes less essential, if not obsolete; a difficulty commoditizing (i.e., making a salable product out of) the technology’s potential; or too much variation in standards or  protocols of use to allow one to market a high quality product that will answer the consumers’ dissatisfactions.

Who remembers the unpredictable “chaotic and vulgar” look of MySpace

compare that to the predictable clean look of Facebook:

Tell me if I (and Tim Wu) are being too cynical here? Is it Facebook’s fault if it just had a better design aesthetic than MySpace? So people want predictability, so what? Technology can’t change human behavior?

I encourage you all to read Evegny Morozov’s brilliant article in the New York Times Sunday Review.  In it, he laments the loss of the cyberflaneur, a brilliant term for one who “strolls” through cyberspace the way a 19th century flaneur would:

leisurely stroll through its (Paris’) streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.”

The changes to the Web in the last decade have made “strolling” obsolete. To put it in more Weberian terms, the Web has been rationalized.  Here’s is a particularly thoughtful passage:

Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely.

He saves most of his scorn for Facebook.

Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by that company. And it’s not just any company: with 845 million active users worldwide, where Facebook goes, arguably, so goes the Internet.

A critique I build on in my upcoming book, Facebook Democracy.  In it, I explore the importance of mystery and detachment from the self to democratic civic life.  I’m particularly struck by this passage in Morozov’s essay:

“The art that the flâneur masters is that of seeing without being caught looking,”

Applied to politics, this translates to a citizen that observes, listens and reads the cacophony of political voices before they jump in.  But Facebook culture, I think, makes that role more difficult to put into practice.  The result is either complete detachment from politics, or a political certainty that equates to having a Jim Rome style “take” of political events.  Neither seems like a good model for democratic citizenship.

A new Pew study on teens and social media highlights a social media “civility gap” between teens and adults online. While 85% of adults find that people are “mostly nice” on social networking site, only 69% of teens say the same.

What’s interesting is that the social media phenomenon has been so explosive that there hasn’t been a generation that has moved from “teen social media” to “adult social media.” Facebook’s rise to prominence has happened in three years. It would be interesting to know whether social networking sites contribute to “nice” or “mean” interactions through their architecture (for instance, Facebook’s insistence on not having a “hate” button, only a “like” button). Or is it simply the fact that teen life is in many ways inherently overtly “meaner” than adult life whose “meanness” is more subtle?

With Facebook’s new IPO that that features Mark Zuckerberg retaining operational control of the company, attention has refocused on how Facebook plans to grow its business moving forward. I’m of the opinion that Facebook isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I’m my class today, we talked about the virtues of Google + as an alternative, but with nobody on this new social networking alternative, there is a strong aversion to join up. How google resolves this problem will determine how much it can compete with Facebook.

But for now, the “sharing train” is leaving the station and of critical concern for everyone is whether to “get on board” (e.g. thrust oneself headlong into sharing) or to resist. A defining battle going forward re: social networking is how you can resist. It’s not as easy as it sounds. If you’re friends and family are on Facebook, does option out make you an anachronism within your networks? You can become the crumudgeon poster who sounds warning bells on your status updates, but that will make you a “buzz kill” pretty quick. Facebook is betting that you won’t resist….that you can’t resist. This is both brilliant and insidious…. they’ve created a good that is as addictive as a drug.. social connection. Stay tuned 🙂