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OurBlook interview with Jessica Clark, director for the Future of Public Media project for the Center for Social Media at American University.
 Can you give us an idea of what your center does? Does it offer classes, do research? What are the social media that you cover?
JC: Pat Aufderheide, the center's director, began the Center for Social Media with a goal of examining, showcasing and creating best practices for makers of social issue media ... especially documentary films, which she has long studied. But over the last few years, the term "social media" has taken on another meaning ... i.e. open, participatory online tools and platforms. These have provided a variety of exciting new opportunities for both professional and citizen media makers to create mission-driven media projects, so now we study a hybrid of both. We see this as a fantastic opportunity for the evolution of what we're now calling "public media 2.0" ... media projects that allow members of society to learn about and act upon shared issues.
Public media 2.0 projects are often multiplatform, shifting from broadcast to print to online, and on into new media forms, like social networks and news games. We've profiled a number of these projects in a series of "field reports," available at www.futureofpublicmedia.net. Our most recent field report examines two Twitter-based projects ... Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration Report '09 .. which provided users the opportunity to report first on their voting experiences and then on their experience at President Obama's inauguration. Both presented breaking reports across a variety of platforms ... mobile phones, blogs, traditional news sites ... and both involved a variety of partners, from voting rights groups, to YouTube, to NPR. Such hybrid projects are now much more common and easier to organize with social media tools.
The CSM is based at American University's School of Communication, and while I'm not on the faculty, Pat does teach, and we often involve AU students and professors in our research projects. We have also funded a set of "demonstration projects" ... experiments in public media 2.0 headed up by SOC professors, such as the Our Stories project (http://www.ourstoriesdc.com/), which features short films by DC-based youth. The CSM has organized a number of popular convenings that explore new trends in social issue and public media, including the annual Making Your Media Matter conference, which happens each spring, and Beyond Broadcast (www.beyondbroadcast.net), a traveling conference about the future of public media that I organized at AU last year and helped to put together at USC Annenberg this year.
What the CSM is probably best known for, however, is creating what we call "codes of best practice." Based on interviews with practitioners and experts, these codes help to clarify thorny issues for media makers and offer guidance for how to deal with them. The CSM publication Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use (http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/statement_of_best_practices_in_fair_use/) has been particularly successful in helping filmmakers to navigate difficult copyright questions during production. It has really helped independent filmmakers to save money and legal hassles, allowing for a greater range of creative production. Other codes that CSM has produced offer best practices for sustainable filmmaking, fair use for online video, and fair use for media literacy educators. You can find these codes and more here: http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/fair_use/.
Can you tell us more about your Future of Public Media Project? If there is a future for public media, what would you like it to be?
JC: I head up CSM's Future of Public Media Project, funded by the Ford Foundation as part of a much larger initiative to transform public broadcasting in a global and digital age. Over the past few years, we've been meeting with media makers and outlets both inside and outside of public broadcasting, analyzing innovative public media 2.0 experiments and working to understand the current media ecosystem. Our research culminated in a white paper that I coauthored with Pat, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics (http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/publications/public_media_2_0_dynamic_engaged_publics/).
In it, we lay out a new vision of public media ... one that isn't tied to the traditional broadcast model, or even predicated entirely on government funding of media projects. Instead, we argue, public media 2.0 is characterized by its ability to provide users with both content and contexts to grapple with the issues that citizens have to jointly address in a democracy. These can range from the local (calling for a stoplight at a dangerous intersection) to the global (addressing climate change), or anywhere in between. Drawing upon sociological and communications theories, we term such groups of engaged citizens "publics." All of us are part of such publics at various points in time, and media are our tools for communication and deliberation.
Journalism has traditionally been a site for such public media functions; documentary films have also provided fodder for conversation, engagement and action. But what's different now is that social media platforms allow users to directly participate in the creation of public media 2.0. This doesn't have to mean that users are replacing professional media makers (although it can). Social media platforms offer a variety of points of entry for engagement: users have a much broader array of media to choose from, they can curate content for one another, start or join online conversations, work with existing outlets to conduct investigations, and more.
All of this is very exciting and generative ... even though traditional media are in crisis, we see a bright future for public media 2.0. But making this future materialize will take conscious investment and policymaking. We can't rely on Google and Twitter alone to host and foster public media 2.0, and we can't rely on taxpayer dollars alone, either. We'll also need new policies that provide citizens with access to social media platforms, and media literacy training so that they understand how to use them responsibly and productively.
We're fortunate, because the current administration understands the power and importance of online tools for citizen engagement, cultural and social innovation, and debate. It's going to be an interesting few years.
There seems to be a quick turnover/burnout rate in Twitter, and devices such as Facebook and YouTube seem used mainly by the young. Whether these devices can become or remain profitable is in doubt. Do you see these, or anything else, as permanent limitations on the scope of social media?
JC: I think social media are here to stay; more and more older people are adopting these technologies, and those young people who have made social media a daily (often hourly) habit are going to grow up and gain in both sophistication and purchasing power. The quick turnover rate on social media platforms makes sense: there are many of them, and some will be more useful to certain people than others. There's a certain novelty value right now that will wear off as people figure out if they're going to be incorporating social media into their lives and work.
The question of how to monetize these services is still up in the air. Advertising is one source of income; value-added services (i.e, charging users for more storage space, vanity account names, ad-free usage, etc.) are another. But is that enough? Many millions of dollars are being bet on such propositions. Much consolidation is sure to follow, especially given the recession, which begs the question of how much power is being granted to particular platforms and companies. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter are now intertwined with national and international politics, as the recent spate of social media reporting in the wake of Iran's contested election dramatically demonstrated. If that's the case, what should countries do to regulate or support these services? It's a conundrum we'll be working out over the next 5-10 years.
Of the various social media, do you see any one in particular as having the greatest potential on the media or generally in society? Any that will fade?
JC: Twitter has shown particular potential because it's so simple and viral ... you don't just interact with it online, the messages can be transmitted via SMS, which means you can both send and receive it from the cell phone in your pocket. That revolutionizes information sharing, and the social aspects of the service ... following, being followed, messaging ... are also easy and fast.
YouTube also has had a tremendous effect on journalism because it has lowered the bar for on-the-spot reporting. Video used to be prohibitively expensive to produce and broadcast, and now it's almost unimaginably cheap. Live broadcasting is the next frontier; services like Qik make it possible for individuals to create, share and distribute live streaming video, again from pocket-sized devices. Many pundits warn about the fragmentation that's sure to follow from such technologies, but I think the best live shows will filter to more trusted outlets with larger audiences, which will create larger audiences for particular kinds of reporting and entertainment.
I do think certain social media platforms, like Second Life, will either contract or transform. It takes enough time to learn how to create and operate an avatar that it might discourage the casual user, and the folks who have gone to great lengths to create their own Second Life properties and personalities are much more rare ... kind of like the people who would have bothered to become authors, filmmakers, or artists in the analog era. In the end, most of us are consumers most of the time ... even those of us who consider ourselves producers.
Which would mean more to you, a Twitter message from someone or an old-fashioned handwritten note from that same person? Do social media represent a chit-chat dumbing down of America, a liberation of new possibilities, or both, or neither?
JC: I actually got two handwritten notes recently from people I met at conferences, and I was both touched and slightly puzzled. It's funny ... the notes made me think "What do they want?" in a way that a direct Tweet asking for something wouldn't.
Social media represent both a chit-chat dumbing down of America and a liberation of new possibilities. Many inane exchanges that would have happened verbally or in our own heads are now on display for all to see, and can be painful to read. At the same time, there are these gorgeous moments that social media makes possible, which we wouldn't have had access to in the top-down media ecosystem.
Michael Wesch, an anthropologist at Kansas State University, gave a keynote talk at the recent Personal Democracy Forum that beautifully showcased some of these moments. He's working with his students on an ethnography of YouTube, and he demonstrated several viral themes that users of YouTube had picked up and run with, including one set of videos in which people write a sentiment on their hand and display it to the camera. It sounds corny, but it's actually very moving, seeing all of these earnest individuals from all over taking the time to write things like "believe" and "one world" and "be heard" and post the videos.
Wesch said this represents a shift from the disenfranchised "whatever" of Generation X ... saturated by marketing and media ... and the "whatever it takes" of a new wave of people who realize that they can be seen and heard, and make things happen. (You can see more of Wesch's great videos on his YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/mwesch).
I had my own social media epiphany when we released our white paper ... within 24 hours, readers from around the globe had Tweeted about it. That's not something that normally happens with academic publications, and it happened because I had taken the time to build up a strong cadre of followers on Twitter (follow me at http://twitter.com/beyondbroadcast) who were interested in the same issues and passed the word on. That capacity is available to all of us ... it's pretty amazing.
Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summit complained that players on the team bus were texting each other rather than speaking face to face. Your reaction?
JC: Doesn't really surprise me ... texting is private, and talking face-to-face is public. It might have bugged the coach because she couldn't listen in, but it probably worked fine for the players.
Big-name athletes and entertainment celebrities seem to have taken to Twitter because 1) they can control their message, 2) the message is short and nontaxing, 3) they bypass reporters, 4) they can have "contact" with fans that really isn't contact and 5) fans end up thinking they have contact though they really don't. The Obama campaign used social media for organizing and a means of getting out the message. Can you see an expansion of uses of social media, perhaps taking a serious turn with politicians and public officials using them to create better policies?
JC: Definitely. There are currently many social media experiments designed to solicit feedback from voters and advocates, increase government transparency, and provide opportunities for debate. The boundaries between online communication and offline action are very permeable .. a number of online organizing campaigns have led to real-world results, from donations to petitions to demonstrations.
That doesn't mean that celebrities won't continue to leverage and dominate social media. Michael Jackson's death overwhelmed social media networks with chatter to such an extent that some users started a petition asking Twitter to filter out any Tweets that contained the word "Jackson." Of course, mainstream broadcasting was also overwhelmed with coverage of the star's death and funeral. Social media platforms are just our newest platform for communication; any and all of society's preoccupations will flow through them.
There have been abuses in the social media such as parody sites allowed on Twitter that pretend to be a celebrity's thoughts but really aren't. Is there much abuse in your opinion and if so, how can it be prevented?
JC: Yes, it's much easier to game social media sites than traditional media (although traditional media haven't been exactly immune to hoaxes and fabulists.) There are a number of ways that Web 2.0 platforms are dealing with this issue. The first is harnessing users as editors, like Wikipedia does. The second is ranking and rating tools, which allow users to flag or demote false or offensive content. The third is fact-checking ... there are a number of watchdog sites that keep an eye on outlets or crowdsource users to report false content. The fourth is usage policies, which allow social media platforms to take down offending content once it has been reported.
It's fascinating, actually ... social media platforms offer a sort of laboratory for how we determine truth. Because the Internet provides so many options for tracking down and verifying sources, I don't see this as such a threat. The key is teaching users how to be more media literate ... to question what they're seeing and triangulate among various sources before accepting something as received wisdom.
Do you have any other thoughts on social media you wish to share?
JC: Social media are value neutral; their main virtue is the promise of democratic communication. This brings along with it all of the difficulties of democratic society ... incivility, bullying, bias, prejudice, privatization, power struggles. These problems aren't a reason to dismiss or fear social media platforms; they're a challenge to each of us to fight for parity, transparency, access and openness.
Jessica, before joining American University, was an editor of In These Times, a national monthly magazine of news, analysis and cultural reporting. She holds an M.A. in social sciences and a B.A. in English, both from the University of Chicago.
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