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- @BarackObama at @BarnardCollege: Reach back, be a mentor. Understand your power and use it wisely.
- @BarackObama: "Don't just get involved, fight for a seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table."
- May 14, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Panera handing out free (packaged) bagels at Harvard T for their grand opening #harvardfreefood
- despite shift of pwr from institutional to nodal/networked, @AlecJRoss urges #hks students to go into gov, fix the 'understanding deficit'!
- @AlecJRoss: ..and that's done with transparency, opengov values. #hks
- Our job as new gen of gov: do no harm. don't break the internet! -@AlecJRoss #hks
- @AlecJRoss: how can we at #hks restructure norms around cyberdomain the way we did on the nuclear front? @shorensteinctr
- in this day&age nobody possesses all the right skillsets; good leaders build hybrid relationshps @JaredCohen to @nicco http://t.co/cWxExrBA
- tech getting smaller/cheaper/more pwerful for individuals; question isn't good or bad? but how to make it net positive? -@JaredCohen
- @scrawford: environmental mvm took off as a result of this image http://t.co/QmkCdn0O what's the equivalent for #netfreedom movement?
- @rmack need mvm pushing corporate responsibility to civil liberties, similar to responsibilities to environment, labor #netfreedom
- @rmack @shorensteinctr MT @tech4changehks: It's up to all of us to shape future of the Internet, ensure it's compatible w/democracy
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Status
- tis the season for cold-brewed coffee
- Obama to young women: "Don't just get involved, fight for a seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table."
- convinced that if i stay on Fb long enough, my paper will write itself.
- problem: need inspiration to draft a presidential speech solution: watch some West Wing
- reasons I love HKS #3: the memo feedback form is a checklist of BAD criteria. because we always aim to be not crappy..
- Major dilemma: who to see on Thurs, Muhamed Yunus or Jon Huntsman?? #harvardproblems
- Paraskevidekatriaphobia (n): a fear of Friday the 13th. Go forth an conquer, friends.
- A 7-Eleven 茶葉蛋 would be so perfect right now..
- boston/cambridge/somerville friends: what're some of the best crazy, fun, unusual things you've done in the area?
- Saying it for the last time: hearing I'm from Taiwan does NOT give you free license to tell me bout all the other Asian countries you've been to.
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Posts
- Nov 07, 11
When journalists get together to bemoan the sad state of the news industry, and denounce the popularity of fluffy online content, there’s always the suspicion that this position comes from a place of intellectual elitism; further proof that these old guard journalists are antiquated and irrelevant.
I’m not so arrogant as to dismiss the benefit to the average person of sources going direct. But it’s important to point out that the question of how to create news content for the web in a way that is helpful to readers/viewers is an important matter of practicality, not a judgment of who’s smarter and more qualified to do so. And the answer, as Clay Shirky points out, isn’t, “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!”
I was surprised by Jaron Lanier’s adamant criticism of Wikipedia and crowd-sourced info-gathering. He hits the nail right on the head. There is a time and place for Wikipedia, and the other spaces that give us direct access to sources– the problem is that a person would have to have a very clear idea of what specific information she’s looking for. The analogous types of journalism would be those that put out information as-it-comes, such as what the wire services do, and the kinds of formulaic stories that can be generated by an algorithm, and even celeb-sighting and short-form pop culture commentary à la Gawker (and yes, i’m calling Gawker journalism, for better or worse.) These are all necessary because they’re timely and serve niche interests.
But what’s missing is what Lanier describes as “personality-based quality control” to improve collective intelligence. Where I disagree with Lanier is that he thinks Wikipedia’s damning flaw is the erasure of personality and voice. The success of Gawker provides a counter-example: It’s a crowd favorite because of it’s outsized and distinct voice (putting aside an argument I’ve made repeatedly that Gawker’s voice is now less fresh/valuable/authentic because it’s become such a conglomerate, and therefore its voice a confusing/self-imitating collective voice.) I realize Gawker’s not exactly the type of crowd-sourced outlet Lanier has in mind, but it’s applicable because blogs like Gawker supply a type of content for which there’s a large demand (as evidenced by its profit), but the pandering to the celeb-obesessed lower-common-denominator is the same kind of collective dumbing that Lanier is distressed about.
Personality alone isn’t what narrows in on collective intelligence; what’s needed is individual wisdom. (See how this then leads us back to the elitism trap?) What I mean by wisdom is not the kind that requires specific training, which many journalists desperately argue is what sets them apart from the masses of amateurs. It’s the ability to take the time to see across timely but momentary news and to analyze their importance by drawing upon historical examples, or to spot potentially suspicious connections between multiple timely occurrences and aggregating these in a meaningful way, or to place into context or explain in non-technical terms the types of very specific information we often find on Wikipedia. Perhaps makes me a bit of a Dead-White-Man-y didact, but this is the type of journalism that I firmly believe we need to–if not shove down the public’s throat like medicine– proactively work to provide the space and means for it to be generated. What makes journalism ultimately meaningful, though, is its ability to concretely benefit readers’/viewers’ lives. So if the masses want lolcats and not journalism, how do we make communication happen– how do we find, and build, an audience?
There are online counterparts to the pre-Internet personality-driven journalism heroes Lanier describes: one example of a successful convergence of personality and solid online journalism is Glenn Greenwald and his blog “Unclaimed Territory.” His small following of progressive readers helped propel him to more mainstream recognition and he moved to blogging at Salon.com. His commentary on constitutional law and issues such as government surveillance have been cited by members of Congress in crucial debates on the floor. There are pitfalls to the cult of personality in media, of course– that is, strong voices are by definition subjective. What’s difficult is creating an outlet that falls somewhere between an Andrew Breitbart and Wikipedia.
To kind of cop out of answering the question of how to build audiences without pandering to the basest instincts of the collective, I think one way out is to eliminate the pressure of growing audiences for the sake of increasing clicks and views to increase ad sales and profits. This is where the 1000 true fans model might come into play. Certain organizations, eg. Propublica, have already adopted a nonprofit model that is not explicitly about garnering 1000 true fans. But by cultivating 1000 true fans, an organization that puts out substantial journalism could, conceivably, fundraise like a nonprofit body to support the journalists’ work. Beyond that, the work would be free for the consumption for those that aren’t large enough regular fans to be willing to chip in– eg. those without the means or willingness to surmount a New York Times-esque paywall.
- Oct 05, 11
When I first heard ‘Pick a topic to research on Wikipedia,’ the first thing that popped into my mind was, inexplicably, ’molecular gastronomy.’ Since I don’t know first thing about that topic, I settled on ‘investigative journalism‘– and created my user account.
The article adheres to technical requirements, such as format, grammar and use of references. In terms of content, the article provides a decent overview the topic, but it does not cover much beyond the basics. Its biggest shortcoming is that it mostly covers historical facts, but doesn’t include the most up-to-date trends. So overall, this article definitely needs more work. Here’s the rundown.
THE GOOD
The article is correctly formatted according to the Wikipedia style guide, with an introduction, sections, references, further reading suggested, and external links. Section headings are concise and relevant, content within sections is clear and consistent, with a neutral point of view, and contains Wikilinks.
In the discussion page for this article, a user brought to attention some overlap in content with an existing article on “exposé”; as a result it was merged into the investigative journalism article and searches for “exposé” now get redirected. (Yay for co-editing!)
THE BAD
I felt the article leaned very heavily on investigative reporting and print news outlets, and did not include work done in broadcast news. The most obvious omission was of CBS’s “60 Minutes” in the section on investigative television programs (only one show is listed, and its run ended in 2010.) Additionally, under “Awards and organizations,” the obvious award for broadcast investigative journalism– the news & documentary Emmy award– is not listed.
What’s also crucially missing is a section on the current state of investigative journalism– the decline of resources allocated to IJ, the laying off of whole investigative departments, and the experimental entities that have sprung up to fill the need. As one Wikipedian astutely mentioned in the discussion section, this article should also include a section on the ethical standards of IJ.
There’s a slight inconsistency in that the notable examples are all American works with a few British ones, and the practices of the field are presumably American; but in the “Bureaus, centers and institutes for investigations” section, an organization from Bosnia-Herzegovina is listed, while all others are American, with one British organization. Why this particular organization may be notable is unclear.
The listed references are pretty solid– mostly from academic sources such as established and respected journalism programs; however the total list numbers very few. In fact, there’s a message at the top of the article calling for additional citations. One final, but minor, missing component is illustrations and images– though I don’t think that is necessary for this topic.
- Sep 27, 11
As someone who came of age with Google, I found Steven Levy’s extensive account of the company’s history endlessly fascinating. His description of how many of Google’s search functions and other apps came about forced me to reflect on a many aspects of the user experience that have become a daily reality for me.
Levy traces the growth of Google as a series of major breakthroughs: Starting with PageRank and crawling for links to an innovative model for selling ads, then to harnessing search data to form contextual advertising and finally to creating a cloud-based information system. Along the way, Google’s founders have, for the most part, maintained their ability to defy tunnel vision and anticipate user needs. Although a unique cultural universe exists In the Plex, Google doesn’t always operate without contradictions—especially when it comes to the issue of secrecy versus transparency. The two sections in Google history that I was particularly interested in were Google’s ventures into telecommunications, and its failed venture in China.
As I read about Google’s developments, I could trace the changes in the way I’ve communicated as I’ve been influenced by the company’s products. I’ve gone from offline communication (could I make an argument that SMS pre-2000 was essentially an offline communication?) to communication at my expedience (email) to the constant online dialogue of gchat—and most recently to the more intimate experience of videochat and video calls. Google has also changed the way I work, and as a user I’m deeply appreciative of how it’s made my life easie. As a college student participating in an extensive research project the led to a policy proposal to university administration, my teammates and I relied on Google docs and chat to share, review and synthesis information. And here in Cambridge, I’ve organized study group meetings on Google hangout.
As much as I sound like a gushing fangirl, I’ve been as wary of Google’s growth over the years as other users. It was particularly ironic to read that co-founder Larry Page wanted to escalate Google’s bidding for bandwidth from the FCC because other players’ willingness to shell out indicated to him that the product was valuable; over the years, users have looked upon each of Google’s newly-released free services with suspicion for essentially the same line of thinking—that if the products were free, there must be a catch.
So although the cloud-based system is undoubtedly (in my mind) the way of future and has clearly already served the user well, there are key questions that were made even more apparent by the account of Google’s failures in China. The obvious problem that arises when we consider the ideal of the cloud is that this system is contingent on users’ unfettered connection to the web—hence Google’s immense interest in the net neutrality debate. But while the issue of online access is more of a commercial one in the U.S., it is much more of a political matter in many other places in the world. This raises two serious questions:
In the case of, for instance, Egypt, where the government compelled mobile carrier Vodafone to shut down service, what recourse do users have when they lose as Clay Shirky pointed out their most efficient tool for collective action?
And what can we learn from Google China? In an environment where malignant elements can penetrate the cloud to deliberately target individuals, can the user still harness the connectivity of the online world while protecting herself offline?
- Sep 19, 11
Clay Shirky lays out a very clear evaluation in Here Comes Everybody of what the web and its social tools mean for institutional organization. He helped synthesize a lot of what I might have already known but have not thought about in a big-picture sort of way. Since I’ve worked in the news industry, I was more interested in the sections on collaborative production than collective action, which I’ll discuss later. But first, the main points I drew about the “ecosystem”:
As we discussed in class, Shirky ‘s main argument is that the new tools of today diminish the need for people to organize through traditional institutional structures. These structures existed for so long not because its characteristics are inherently good; given the limitations of communication and organization (as a verb, not noun), institutional hierarchies were simply the least-bad way to bring people together. The great thing about the web and other new tools is that they significantly decrease transaction costs–the factor that causes inefficiency in traditional institutional structures– to make organizing and group-forming easier, cheaper and faster.
One of the ideas Shirky posits that I found most provocative is that a professional is defined not just by the task she is trained to do but by the set of norms surrounding the task, and therefore “she pays as much or more attention to the judgment of her peers as to the judgment of her customers when figuring out how to do her job.” (Kindle Locations 782-783.) Shirky is mostly addressing the ills of print news outlets when he talks about “the news,” and though the broadcast networks’ failures to adapt are similar to those of publishers, there are some slight differences I feel should be pointed out.
Shirky is accurate in that what has traditionally been in the news had to 1. be considered newsworthy and 2. fit into the publication/broadcast cycle. And while the internet forced print outlets to lose their reliance on the publication cycle, broadcast outlets still face a much higher barrier to entry because more specific and technical skills are required than in print. We’ve seen in breaking news situations how valuable user-generated content can be, but the majority of video-based news requires more information than just raw video. So although news organizations’ defensiveness of the old ways of ‘doing news’ does stem from a resistance to change, I would hesitate to agree with him that the traditional division of labor in broadcast news is absolutely backwards and bad for the public. This is why the model of collaborative production is more applicable to new journalistic endeavors than the collective action model.
The difficulty in applying the “promise, tool, bargain” guideline to re-organize news-gathering institutions lays in the fact that the “promise” requires people to be motivated by a common, and fairly specific, purpose. This may be why highly partisan news-related outlets have proliferated and flourished online—high passions make for built-in audiences. But the mission of a news organization is not to cover narrow beats, but to be general most of the time, and targeted only in breaking news situations. To re-hash an oft-lamented downside of the internet age, the new web reality leads to group-formation to a certain extent, but it also leads to more fracturing.
One final point that Shirky briefly alluded to but which I feel should be again highlighted: When we discuss the effectiveness of new social tools in organizing people, we are talking to a certain extent about these tools organizing people who are already fairly empowered in society and who, without these tools, would have other (though more inefficient) means of organizing. That is, the people with access to these social tools are already those with high access to information. For instance, Shirky cites Meetup as a success in helping soccer moms overcome geographic constraints to organize. A fairly informed soccer mom faces no barrier in going online because it’s assumed she already has a vague notion of what to look for. For those who have historically been marginalized by traditional institutions, how do we provide them with the knowledge and information that is assumed knowledge to the rest of us?
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Info
- Digital journalist, TV news & documentary producer, social media strategist.Online Media | Greater Boston Area, USExperience
- Apr 2012 - Present"Rio Matters" Project lead / United Nations FoundationCreated social media campaign and provided online coverage on issues surrounding Rio+20, the UN conference on sustainable development. http://riomatters.org
- Jan 2012 - May 2012Research Assistant / Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy SchoolConducted research for Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum and editor of TechPresident.com, on historical impact of the Internet on politics and civic life.
- Sept 2010 - Dec 2010Associate Producer / NBC News/Peacock ProductionsProduced documentary special "Tom Brokaw Presents: Bridging the Divide" for USA Network. http://www.charactersunite.com/video/doc
- Dec 2009 - Aug 2010Digital Journalist / NBC News/Daily ConnectionProducer/editor for start-up daily, live news show airing on NBC affiliate stations.
- Sept 2008 - Dec 2009Associate Producer / Bill Moyers Journal/Public Affairs TelevisionDeveloped and produced stories at weekly PBS news analysis show. http://www.pbs.org/moyers
- Aug 2007 - Aug 2008News Associate / NBC NewsProduced, edited, shot stories for Nightly News, Today Show, Weekend Today and Dateline NBC, including at Beijing Olympics for Today.
Education-
2011 - 2013Harvard Kennedy School of GovernmentMasters in Public Policy in International & Global Affairs
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2003 - 2007Columbia University in the City of New YorkBachelor of Arts in Anthropology, Comparative Ethnic Studies
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