Seeing the world with the eyes of a fly:
Social media as the new watchdog

By Larry Elin, Associate Professor,  S.I. Newhouse School, Syracuse University

Last month, like many Americans, I allowed myself to feel a measure of schadenfreude while watching the Iranian government struggle with hundreds of thousands of protesters of its rigged election.

At first, I enjoyed moments of secret, guilty glee watching the difficult time the Iranian government had keeping the lid on their larceny, a transparency made possible because its people had mastered social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to communicate, organize and inform the world about their protests. Then we saw the government’s brutal response, and it turned to horror.  A young woman, beaten to a pulp by the Basij and left to bleed to death on the street, remains a vivid, iconic vision.

I was reminded then of the opening salvos of our invasion of Iraq. We watched the air strikes on Baghdad from a single vantage point atop a hotel, narrated by cable news correspondents. Off in the distance, miles away, a bright light, followed a few seconds later by a dull thud.  “That was the radio station,” a broadcast journalist would say.

When we could catch a glimpse of the war on the ground, it was reported by journalists embedded with troops, riding along in Humvees, wearing body armor, tapping out a story on a laptop.  Everything seemed quite sanitary. Fox News, the Bush administration’s private public relations agency, even branded the conflict. Colorful logos, possibly designed by the same graphic artist responsible for “American Idol,” declared it was “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

And I began to wonder if the initial popularity of our invasion of Iraq (78 percent of Americans supported it) would have held sway if thousands of ordinary Iraqis, pounded by our bombs, had twittered the world, swamped YouTube with cell phone videos, and had created a Facebook page featuring their version of the bloodied female.

These two events, both a half a world away, both caused by what we now know were official lies, illustrate how far social media have come in six years, and how far they may yet go in enabling the public to become the new (and better) watchdogs ... a role traditional media have abdicated.

I have good reason for seeing the inherent value in social media as they begin to intersect with government, politics and the press.  In his masterful book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki chronicles, “Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations (the book’s subtitle).”

In example after example, he shows how large groups of people, pooling their individual bits of knowledge, make better decisions than a small number of experts who supposedly know everything. He then dissects these crowds, and culls out the characteristics that make them work, and work well, so often. Chief among them are decentralization, diversity, independence, coordination, collaboration and trust.

Four of these are essential:  a crowd must be diverse, so that lots of different opinions (or bits of knowledge) come into the decision-making process; a crowd must be decentralized, so that no single influencer can direct the outcome; a crowd must be independent, so that “good” information can balance out “bad” information; and there must be collaboration, so that all of this information can result in a “collective intelligence.” Eventually, he describes how both the stock market and our democracy work well based on this theory, as long as wise crowds participate and experts don’t manipulate or hijack the process.

One can immediately see how the public protests over the election fraud in Iran, and its dissemination by social media, are a case study of Surowiecki’s wise crowd theory. The crowd consists of thousands of individuals who are armed with cell phones, Blackberries and laptops, and who have Internet access to social media aggregation sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Youtube.

They report bits and pieces of information from deep within the protests in a decentralized fashion: no one individual influences the rest.  The crowd is diverse: individuals are located all over Tehran, and other parts of the country.  The crowd is independent: some of the information is “bad,” in that it is planted by Iranian authorities, but it is quickly balanced by “good” information.  Social media aggregation sites provide the collaboration necessary for the entire world to develop a “collective intelligence” about what is going on there by seeing all of the individual, small parts.

Interestingly, it was our very own CNN, Fox News and MSNBC that served the role of synthesizing all of the bits of information, and facilitating a collective intelligence. Much to their own chagrin, unable to gather information, images, or stories on their own, the professional news organizations relied on all of those "unverified" sources from Twitter and YouTube to piece together what was happening in Iran.

We, then, formed our mental picture ... our reality ... of what was happening in Iran because thousands of news sources on the ground acted like the eye of a fly (seeing it from thousands of perspectives), while the cable news folks made a single image of it, which we hope was an accurate synthesis.  

An interesting aside here is how superior the social media reporting from Iran is, compared to what we might have expected from our professional press corps had they been allowed to cover the events.  Imagine how much less we would know if all of our information had come from a press-pool, rooftop camera, rather than the thousands of views provided by the citizens.

It isn’t difficult to visualize the potentially powerful effects of social media on politics in this country. We had a small inkling of this in 2006, when Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia insulted a videographer of Indian descent with the racial epithet “macaca” during a campaign speech.  Videotaped by the target of the insult, posted on YouTube and later shown on every major television network, the moment may have cost Allen the election. The result was a Democratic majority in the Senate during Bush’s final two years in office, and a head start for Obama, who also won in Virginia.

Earlier, the photos of abuse by U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, widely circulated on the Internet, had awakened the American people to a dark and discomforting aspect of our war on terror, and helped to turn the tide of public opinion against the war.

To be sure, social media are a frightening phenomenon to incumbents in the press, in politics and in the media. To the incumbents, social media are profoundly disruptive because of how they obviate their ownership of the "choke point" in the communication channel.  Their power is based on control of scarcity: scarce resources, capital, intellectual property, and modes of production and distribution.

Media conglomerates and political parties monopolize professionalism, and in the past this had enabled them to control the message ... how it is created, how it is distributed, and how it is consumed.

However, the Internet, and the social media environment it facilitates, has created a world of information abundance: both created by and consumed by the same population ... the emerging “prosumer.” Social media are creating an information environment that is making the professional press corps and media conglomeration less and less relevant, and a government that is more and more transparent.

My mental picture of the effects of social media on the press and politics, based on what we have seen so far and the trends that lie just below the surface, is this:

·        Social media sites will evolve and become more granular, more sophisticated and more focused. LinkedIn, a site for connecting professionals, is a good example, although it, too, could be broken into more granular parts, each with a special interest.

·        Social media sites will not only aggregate public opinion, but will also have the effect of shaping it, and public policy, in the manner of the “wisdom of crowds.”

·        The press, the media and political incumbents will have to adapt to an environment in which power is shared with these aggregations of people, because they will no longer control any of the “choke points” in the communication channel.

·        Aggregations will take on the watchdog role that traditional media had in the past.

·        Government will become more accountable to the aggregations.

There are dystopian aspects to this vision of the future, which I will write about in a future essay.  I’ll argue with myself.  Meanwhile, I look forward to your ideas and comments.

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