A couple of days back, after watching the addictive stream of fake and real pictures emerging from New York, and following the fascinating real-time efforts by the Atlantic and the "Is Twitter Wrong?" tumblog at telling them apart, I was inspired to post this little note on my Facebook profile:
Seems like the very nature of media is evolving as we tweet #sandy. The sewage stream of real/fake pictures and updates that's being filtered in real time and reacted to from a million perspectives...this is media as hypnotic/surreal collective hallucination. Watching CNN alongside this is like watching a black and white movie. I think this is the first time America is properly experiencing its own new technologies. America might have finally found its own #iranelection/Haiti/Fukushima type social media coming-of-age event.
The coverage that followed only reinforced this impression. The developments have led me to some interesting conclusions about the future of media in America. The key to how Sandy will reshape the media landscape is Kahnemann's model of decision-making in Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I am currently reading, and the ongoing evolution of our data environments thanks to Big Data.
Watching news anchors pretending they still had control of the story was funny and sad at the same time. One line on my local news channel in particular cracked me up. After showing a montage of pictures taken off Twitter, the anchors said something like,
"It's great that so many amateurs are joining in to help us out. For such a big event, we can't be everywhere and cover everything of course, and if you can safely get out to take a picture, do so and send it to us."
Then they moved on to a montage of weather reporters encountering minor mishaps in previous hurricanes (including one of Al Roker saying, "I wish I had my weight back" and slipping and falling).
News flash for my local news anchors: the "amateurs" aren't "helping out" the "professionals." They are mostly ignoring them. They are mostly sending their pictures to their friends, not to you.
It was surreal: in their efforts to keep up, mainstream media ended up portraying Sandy like an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos, and themselves as completely out of touch.
The whole effect was like a Tennessee Williams play. A desperate keeping-up of appearances while being marginalized. Anyone who was actually interested in following the developments closely was on Twitter and Facebook. If they were watching TV at all, they were, I suspect, watching for a sort of dark train-wreck entertainment, not authoritative commentary.
The Two Systems and Sandy
Now that things have calmed down a bit, mainstream media is back in control of what's left of the story. But the crucial takeaway is that social media owned the attention spike through its peak. Regular media is being left with the dregs of the media opportunity.
The post-event analysis game is of course open to all, but mainstream media have much less of an advantage there, since domain-expert bloggers working off the same information can generally produce better opinions. Not journalists.
In thinking about how this is all playing out, and what it means for media in America, I was reminded of Kahnemann's model where he talks about two systems of decision-making. Wikipedia summarizes the difference as follows:
- System 1: Fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, subconscious
- System 2: Slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious
As a blogger first and quasi-something here at Forbes second, I sort of straddle the fence here. But before you quickly jump to the conclusion that social media maps to System 1 and traditional media to System 2, think slow for a moment. It isn't that simple.
The truth of the matter is that around events like Sandy, social media actually threatens traditional media on both fronts, fast and slow. The advantage is decisive in System 1 reporting. The advantage is significant, if not decisive, in System 2 reporting. The playing field is level; institutional information from the weather bureau and government sources is open to all.
It won't stay level. It's about to tilt in favor of social media.
Big Data as the Knockout Punch
Traditional media today is reeling from a one-two punch. The first punch came a decade ago, when the blogosphere ended the monopoly on content publishing. The second punch came when Facebook and Twitter ended the distribution monopoly for traditional media, by giving bloggers equal access to the channels.
Until a year or so ago, traditional media could still take solace in the fact that they still had privileged access to raw information and the resources (financial and legal) for investigative journalism, even if it is taking a painful shift to nonprofit funding to retain the privilege, via institutions like Pro Publica.
Now mobile devices and Big Data technologies are about to deliver a knockout punch: for all but the most hidden of investigative journalism stories, the monopoly over raw material and investigative resources is also about to disappear. And if controversial figures like Julian Assange are succeeded by less controversial ones, even that last stronghold will be threatened.
Sandy is just the opening act: much of the ongoing information supply, fact-checking and cleaning around Sandy is human-driven. But consider the technologies being used: it isn't careful investigation of locked-up archives, but crowd-sourced expertise and quick checks on Google Images, that is helping tell real and fake images apart.
As these technologies get more sophisticated and automated, and sites like Snopes evolve technologically on the backend, traditional media is going to find itself increasingly unable to compete on the supply side. It's only a matter of time before an entrepreneur starts an automated image verification startup that uses machine learning to tell fake and real photos apart in a firehose.
Traditional media does have a role to play, but it is going to require tremendous imagination to invent it.
Footnote
This post is partly inspired by some of my ongoing consulting work on the future of data. If you are involved in emerging data technologies, and are interested in the broader trend of which the evolution of media is one example, you may want to check out my recent blog post Ecosystem Stewardship and the Emerging Bipolar World of Data.
The post includes a link to a survey I am conducting on the state of the Big Data trend. Any help getting me responses to the survey (details at the link above) will be much appreciated.
Footnote #2
I am moving to Seattle next week; would be great to meet up with any interested readers in the area; do drop me a line if you're in the area.
