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November 5, 2009
There is a Media 140 event happening in Sydney over the next two days, with a live stream, live blogging, and real time twitter. Though the concern is with the impact of social media on journalism the focus is on twitter. The conference format is a mixture of keynote speeches and panels with speeches plus questions at the end. It was all text based journalism with no mention of photographers.
There is still a fear of, and disdain for, the social media being expressed by various media conservatives (eg., the ABC's Chris Uhlman and Robyn Williams from the ABC Radio National’s Science Show) but the bashers of Bloggers/Facebookers/Twitterers were in a minority. There were constant references back to objectivity and the essence of journalism (the truth?), journalism as a profession, and journalism in the grand investigative style. However, the emphasis was more on the new social media. Malcolm Turnbull was the only politician to speak and he spoke about getting the message out across all platforms. That challenges McLuhan.
Mark Scott,, managing director of the ABC, kicked things off this morning by saying that the ABC is reinventing itself from a rigid institution based around a static collection of platforms to becoming a generator, commissioner, distributor and enabler. So it is interpreting the social media as "consumer" empowerment, social interaction, dialogic ethics and ongoing conversations.
Scott, who comes across as an industry leader, spelt this out in two ways. Firstly, the development of the digital townhall concept (now the ABC Open Project) that was connected to 50 digital media producers stationed in ABC centres with a brief to work with local communities to help them create their own media. This depends upon the development of high speed broadband through the National Broadband Network.
Secondly, there will be the launch of “ABC Widgets” that will allow anyone to run ABC news feeds on websites and social networking pages. This will position the innovative ABC in the centre of the digital mediascape, and probably as the key player. This was the only substantive mention of "the audience" for most of the day. What was never addressed was deciding what does and does not legitimately belong within the national debate was a political act.
The context of this reinvention of the ABC is that the economics of the internet is impacting heavily on the industrial age media factories--it is pushing the financially threatened Fairfax media o the edge, and is forcing News Ltd to go behind the pay wall with its product linked to a Kindle or Apple Tablet type platform. Both these media factories miss the consumer empowerment of the internet, in that this new technology enables people to have "human to human" conversations, which have the potential to transform traditional business practices radically.
Jason Wilson, one of the morning panelists, deflates the signifance of Twitter "revolution":
There are some fallacies of futurology that recur when new media arrive. New media are always seen as superseding their predecessors, but very few media technologies disappear from use in any simple way. They persist alongside emerging ones, because they still have applications. New media are always seen as more transparent, but when we settle down we usually realise that no medium is a pure avenue of information; each one is used to select and frame events in specific ways. New media are often seen as democratising, but what do we mean by that exactly, beyond a normative endorsement? In fact, new media tend to gather unique publics, and there's enough research about social networks now to suggest that they have specific audiences, and are capable of exclusion as well as inclusion.
The key here is not the technology per se, but the way the social practice of journalism is being changed by the new social participatory media, and how it gives rise to different forms of writing (images and text) across a variety of media platforms. These forms of writing are expressing our content and our stories. These are narratives from below, and they are the democratising bit.
Media conservatives, of course, reject this. Thus Ben Macintyre in The Times says:
Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.... The internet, while it communicates so much information so very effectively, does not really “do” narrative. The blog is a soap box, not a story. Facebook is a place for tell-tales perhaps, but not for telling tales. The long-form narrative still does sit easily on the screen, although the e-reader is slowly edging into the mainstream. Very few stories of more than 1,000 words achieve viral status on the internet.....Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information.
Surely there will be new opportunities for storytellers to work with each other and share their tales with broader audiences online. Isn't that what the "passive audience" becoming user generators means in the context of the social media?
Telling our stories means challenging the way the media maintains boundaries around the sphere of legitimate debate; undermining the way that what Jay Rosen calls the “ground” of consensus is established by the professional political class in Canberra, and then offering that tightly bounded consensus to the country as if it were the country’s own.
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the ABC is an expansionist mode according to the Age:
That expansion depends on funds from Canberra.