Amateurs for human rights in China

Tony Long, in his Luddite column at Wired, has registered another traditionalist's complaint against Web 2.0 and in moderated support of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture.

To Long, the Internet ("a narcissist's dream come true") has performed a disservice by supplying amateurs with tools for reporting on events that only trained professionals should have access to.

He complains that "opportunity and desire alone do not professional historians or journalists or pundits make. There's this process known as 'learning your craft' and 'paying your dues' that all professionals must endure. Sorry, but trolling the web and blogging from your darkened study doesn't qualify as on-the-job training."

As someone who spent eight years of postgraduate work earning my doctorate, I wholly support the idea of "learning your craft" and "paying your dues" toward your professional credentials. What I can't credit is Mr. Long's assumption that our professional historians, journalists and pundits are doing a swell job without the interference of the untrained, poorly informed masses.

The media may be chock full of professionals; but in these days when even NPR has begun parroting the Bush administration's recent, transparent act of propaganda in labeling every insurgent in Iraq as "Al Qaeda," many of them don't seem to be measuring up to their responsibilities.

It seems to be the professionals, rather than the amateurs, who are "killing our culture."

But never mind about the American situation, for a moment. Imagine instead a country where media is overtly controlled by the government and the elite, where ordinary citizens have no hope of drawing attention to gross injustices because the press has been ordered not to report on them. That's the point of a heartening story at Breitbart.com, about 400 Chinese parents turning into "citizen journalists" to rescue their children from slave labor conditions in brickyards.

"The parents' Internet posting was part of a growing phenomenon for marginalised people in China who can not otherwise have their complaints addressed by the traditional, government-controlled press," Breitbart reports. In another case, police riots aimed at flower sellers in Zhengzhou were recorded on someone's cell phone and eventually posted on YouTube.

In response to this growing power in the hands of a previously powerless group of people, the Chinese government has called for a "purification" of the Internet, and has tightened its crackdown of "cyber dissidents."

That's probably the best way to deal with amateurs. They ruin everything.

Democrats turn out to be good at "doing" the Internet

Jose Antonio Vargas, in yesterday's (May 21) Washington Post, gave an insightful commentary on politics and new media, pointing out that "the culture of Democrats is a much better fit in the Internet world" than Republican culture.

The Republican party's greatest strength in decades past has been their disciplined technique of staying unified in the delivery of its message. The standard procedure is to formulate the message at the top, at the level of the RNC or the White House, then distribute that message downward through various media outlets.

But that process doesn't work in "the often chaotic, bottom-up, user-generated atmosphere of the Internet."

The less discipline, more fractious Democratic party is being invigorated by the free forum chaos of Web 2.0, according to Peter Leyden of the New Politics Institute: "All this talking and discussing and fighting energizes everyone, involves everyone, and gets people totally into it."

The few Republican triumphs online that Vargas chronicles, which include 2004 attacks on John Kerry and Dan Rather, were still top-down, coordinated projects rather than grassroots initiatives by cadres of amateur politicos, as has generally been the case with the notable Democratic successes, such as the YouTube broadcast of George Allen's regrettable "Macaca" comment.

Republicans have had astonishing success on radio, which McLuhan called the "tribal drum." The advent of Web 2.0 offers a new, radically different form of participatory community where the voices of Democrats and Progressives may speak the loudest.

Tragedy, news, and social networking

As students at Virginia Tech cope with this week's tragedy on their campus, and attempt to return to a normal life, many of them are expressing anger at the press for creating a state of siege on their campus. "You've got your story. Now go home," one young woman said this morning during a story on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.

One grievance that students have raised -- and it's a legitimate one -- is over the way that reporters from wire services, newspapers, television and radio raided their LiveJournal, Facebook and MySpace pages hoping to contact witnesses to the shootings, urgent for interview time. Robin Hamman at cybersoc.com has compiled a catalog of requests students received from ABC, the LA Times, CBC, CNN and others. Some display sensitivity to what the students' emotional turmoil, but others lived up to the mainstream media's image as crass, heartless purveyors of suffering.

Slate's Michael Agger reports that a number of students, realizing they were drawing media attention "rapidly set their journals and MySpace pages to friends-only," to block unwelcome demands for details and emotional reactions that one anonymous poster satirized with the words: "Please let us exploit your grief. ASAP THANKS!"

That was the right decision, but the fact that it needed to be made points out the dilemma of social networking, that it erases the distinction between public and private. By posting personal messages to their network of friends, on a public site, the students opened themselves to this kind of unwanted attention, at a moment when tragedy drew the eyes of the media to their campus.

Robin Hamman urges the news media to "Think before you link. Understand that some content published in public was never intended to be seen by a mass audience." He's drawing an intriguing and subtle distinction between the "public" and the "mass" -- probably too subtle for anyone to expect a reporter hot on the trail of a breaking story to observe, though.

Sadly, this issue will come up again, during some future crisis or catastrophe when social networking once more becomes citizen journalism. But a richness will result from the ability of individuals to tell their stories at first hand, unmediated, and for those stories to link organically, for a fuller picture to emerge.

As TextualDeviance has pointed out of the Virginia Tech tragedy, "the students and student journalists at this school have done a better job of covering it than the mainstream media have, by not only being more on top of it, but by integrating content from multiple sources into a cohesive, continually updated story that still manages to be journalistic despite much of its amateur origins."

The price of that richness will be a further sacrifice of the personal and the private.