INFORMATION FLOWS: SPEAKING IN TONGUES WHILE SEEDING SOCIAL NETWORKING
By Crocker Snow Jr.

The lifespan of new media as an essential news source in the U.S. and Arab worlds respectively can be measured on the fingers of two hands. New media has dominated for approximately ten years in the United States and about half that in the Arab world. Little enough time to draw conclusions about the socializing effects of new media, about best and worst practice or even the dangers due to their capacity to offer narrow perspectives on the one hand or irresponsible unaccountability on the other.

Yet 5–10 years is more than sufficient to take revealing exit polls and count the early returns.

The 2008 Arab-U.S. Media Forum at the Dead Sea provided this opportunity. Thirty practitioners, entrepreneurs and thinkers exchanged insights, experiences and frustrations. They spoke the same new media language as if a common mother tongue.  And they clearly agreed on several fundamental precepts of the field. 

Such as:

• New media are typically user driven, with more control vested in the user’s pull of desired content  than the much more characteristic producer driven push-pull dynamics of traditional print and broadcast media.
• The barriers to entry in the field are extremely low compared to traditional forms of print and broadcast. However, the opportunity to gain attention from an informa-tion saturated public is also extremely low.
• New media enable new forms of "citizen journalism" and, due to their accessibility, a great capacity for social networking among like-minded individuals and affinity groups.
• New media provide opportunities for the marginalized individual, community or point of view to get attention and, with merit and good timing, to advance into the mainstream.
• Still today, new media are often "authorized" as reliable and their news breaks notable only when picked up by or reported on by traditional media.

Such generally agreed-upon points only scratch the surface. The pressures, priorities and, most especially, pace of new media are vastly different than those of traditional media, and quite different as well in the Arab and American worlds respectively.

New media developed as an essential source of news in the United States starting in the mid 1990’s only slowly, without much fanfare. They arrived on the scene due to the entrepreneurial drive of some dot-com pioneers and technocrati and with resistance from existing media companies. Only gradually did traditional media recognize the opportunity—and the threat—and take up stewardship of the new media cause. The publisher of the New York Times calls one of that newspaper's primary roles "to curate the web."

The traditional print and broadcast media in the Arab world also shunned new media initially, and almost all notable new media initiatives were first developed by entrepreneurs rather than by existing news organizations.

INFORMATION TREES FALLING IN THE CRESCENDO FOREST

With this parallel ancestry, the interplay among Arab and American participants at the symposium revolved much more around questions of effect than of cause.

New media are changing the very physics of information preparation, retrieval and use. They have changed the information gauge from one in which content was scarce and attention-abundant to one in which there is an abundance—if not superabundance—of information.

Attention is the scarcest and arguably most valued commodity. There are, in effect, too many information trees falling in the forest for the ear to hear.

Stewart Brand, a pioneer of the Internet and the online field, has argued that the Internet’s principal breakthrough is enabling the free flows of information. "Information wants to be free," he is famously quoted. But not always, or in the view of all.

"Information does not want to be free. It wants to be labeled, organized, and filtered so that it can be searched, cross-referenced and consumed," write Jack Goldsmith and Timothy Wu, professors at the Harvard and Columbia Law Schools respectively. "Information filtering is especially crucial to the Net, where it is so easy to publish, and where the danger of information overload is so great."

Moreover, the Internet and worldwide web are blurring the lines between users and producer-providers. The observant and web-savvy citizen with a camcorder or smart phone has become a primary, if not always reliable, news source.

Evidence of how far this trend has come is the American blogger, Joshua Micah Marshall, founder and editor of Talking Points Memo, who won the coveted George Polk Award for legal reporting this year. He credited the readers of his blog and their posted contributions as the true sine qua non of his success. And in the Middle East, Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas—whose YouTube account was shut down by the government—has been widely recognized and applauded by others.

The very transparency that new media provide is changing the rules of governance. Information has always been a primary coin of the realm for governments, and now citizens as much as government officials are its bankers and cashiers.

There are contradictory social and information effects to be sure. Social networking facilitated by the Internet allows affinity groups to support and learn from each other, for citizens to coalesce around a cause.

Yet the socializing effect of a limited number of established news sources of the past has given way to a confusing embarrassment of riches. The new media age is a far cry from yesteryear when, for instance, American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s noted and infrequent Fireside Chats were heard by vast numbers of Americans at the same time and through the single medium of radio as a shared experience of community consciousness raising.

Today the capacity for a user to select and even customize his own information package can also serve to reinforce one's own existing views and prejudices rather than ventilate them with fresh perspectives. It can, in the extreme, heighten the negative social effect characterized by David Putnam’s book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

The advent of new media in the Arab Middle East was inhibited at first by low levels of computer literacy and the high cost of Internet access in the region. Most early usage was in English only; non-English speakers need not have applied.

This is no longer the case. Internet literacy is rising and access costs dropping. Reportedly over half the pages posted on the worldwide web are not in English and more than 50 per cent of Internet use in the Arab world is now conducted in Arabic.

Governments in the Arab world, as elsewhere, are playing catch-up, struggling with the technology and new user psychology simultaneously. Arab new media insiders recognize the symptoms, speaking among themselves of "analog" and "digital" ministers.

ANALOG AND DIGITAL GOVERNMENT REACTIONS

Many governments are decidedly schizophrenic, advocating increased Internet access as an important tool for development while simultaneously undertaking awkward, often ineffective, efforts at shutting down web sites they find offensive.

The new world of online news sites, aggregators, bloggers and citizen journalism via mobile phone went largely unrecognized initially by Arab governments and was thus unthreatening to them. Arab journalists had been conditioned to self-censorship. Not so with bloggers, who typically came with little journalism experience and fewer self-constraints. Unaccountability and anonymity provided some assurance of safety in the Arab world.

Until recently, the Internet has been difficult to censor. As one insider put it, "The Net treats censorship as a technical defect, and simply routes around it." But as bloggers particularly began drawing attention to government policies and inciting opposition to unpopular actions, more sophisticated attempts to suffocate the enabling technology have occurred.

"If your staff is well trained and with good research backing you up and some legal protection, then it’s very tough for governments to crack down," remarked Rana Sabbagh, Amman-based director of the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. "But if your staff is not well trained, then you’re just sending out suicide bombers."

Significantly, the most important and commercially successful of these Arab aggregators, Maktoob.com, was developed in Jordan, that Arab country with the high-est rate of computer literacy and Internet application whose government is active in boosting it.

Based on Web 2.0, Maktoob is now 70 percent user produced and counts a total of 700,000 blogs in 22 countries. About 100 blogs are added daily. Maktoob is financially successful as well. But its founder Sami Toukan, a participant at the Dead Sea conference, sees a cloudy future. “The promise of the Internet is under threat,” he told the conference participants. "The dream of one Internet world is being dashed. We’re fighting a holding action with governments now.”

OLD REPTILES AND NEW BIRDS

All media analysts talk of convergence. The group gathered at the Dead Sea was no exception. The normal idea—convergence between types of media—was expanded by participants to convergence among those who practice different media ways and means. Are the journalist and the blogger merging into one?

The Arab–U.S. Media Forum participants fell into two camps regarding whether new media activists can truly claim professional journalist status as compared to what one called “diarists.” There was no disagreement, however, that the media rules are changing almost faster than those engaged can react or attach labels to themselves.

Internet access not only makes possible interactivity between users, but also altogether new approaches to the who, why's and how’s of information delivery. Until the present, the speed of downloading information has always exceeded the speed of uploading, as a function of supply and demand. This is beginning to change as bloggers plant and seed information at unprecedented rates.

Still, full convergence of the time-honored professional journalist who relies on long-cultivated sources for inside information while utilizing traditional print and broadcast forms, and the new breed of cyberspace activist, an open-source citizen surfer diarist, is neither imminent nor inevitable.

As one evolutionary-oriented forum participant aptly put it, "No one is asking bloggers to come in at 10:00 in the morning and drink bad coffee. There is too much difference between the new and the old. It’s a matter of Darwin, with old reptiles and new birds."

Crocker Snow Jr., founding editor of The WorldPaper, is director of the Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy at the Fletcher School.

Previous | Next