photo credit: Chris_Carter_
“Video killed the radio star” hit the airwaves at the end of the seventies. Soon it might be time to sing “Facilitation killed the Twitter star” as social media development coupled with information overload and fatigue merge for a not so catchy chorus.
Twitter is merging as both an inlet and outlet for the latest news. Journalists and whistleblowers alike are manning the feeds and putting everything out there, while one after one of the Everyday Joes and Johannas are also finding their way there to listen to these almost fanatical news mongerers. In Sweden, there are a number of them, like Emanuel Karlsten and Haris Alisic. People who have a nose for the news, and both the energy to plow threw, redistribute and comment them. But will this last? I say no, not in the way we are seeing and believing right now.
Because, while the Haris’s and Emanuel’s are easy enough to follow right now, their likes are spreading like a virus. More and more people are following their example, and that makes the feed hard to handle when the shit hits the fan. In recent weeks, the disaster in Norway hit hard and near home to us Swedes. Subsequently, the Twitter feed kept a close eye on the development and you could follow the mayhem closely, without even turning on the tv or visiting CNN.com. It was not overwhelming, as long as you stayed of following the hashtag #Utøya, but it was still clear that the quantity of engaged people has grown exponentially in Scandinavia. And just as with #Utøya, we have seen similar but even more frantic tendencies in for example #Libya.
The Year of the News Overload
There are plenty of social media aficionados who like to promote this as “the end of traditional media”. Following the Twitter feed is quicker and more direct, why in the world should we wait for journalists to meet their deadlines with this golden opportunity at our hands? But as some more levelheaded nerds say, we still need the more thorough and investigative news that our traditional reporters provide, maybe just in another format. I would like to add one more bit to that analysis, and it is the fact that I believe that we will soon see a reaction to the oh so quickly updating Twitter feed, just as itself was once a reaction to (informal) dictatorships trying to stop news of demonstrations and uprisings to reach the outside world. Why? Well, I think Zoe Williams of the Guardian was spot on in her analysis a few weeks ago.
“They’re [the news] superseded so fast that you never get time for that half-knowledge to turn into full knowledge before the next thing happens. The effect is a news twilight, where you can’t even be sure what has been confirmed and what hasn’t.”
A reaction is bound to come as quality becomes more and more desired when quantity and speed reigns. We can already see the early signs, in for example the constant complaining about our deer friends on Facebook posting… well, crap in all shapes and sizes! And while news outlets like my own try to engage our more common readers more, as I described in yesterday’s blog post, I’m personally not expecting these others to reach the unprecedented level of us enthusiastic maniacs, who clutter the Twitter feed during the Year of the News Overload we call 2011. Even we won’t be able to keep (it) up.
Watch out for digital fatigue
The New York times yesterday published a piece on Jessica Lawrence, an early adopter, who is consciously focusing only on one social media channel in order to not burn out and fade away. She’s feeling the pressure to be omnipresent, but is realizing that she cannot. And late adopters will probably see the same stress come lurking, if they haven’t already. Facebook works well for connecting with their friends, but when they hear about the proclaimed Facebook killer Google Plus, and how they are so outdate because they don’t get their news through Twitter? More and more people increase their use of tools for digital communication, and there is an end to how much you can take. Really.
At the same time, we’re seeing a parallell trend of pressure emerge.
“But any attempt by weary networkers to scale back is complicated by the proliferation of Web sites like Klout and PeerIndex that are busily computing users’ influence scores to rank them in an online hierarchy.” (Stephanie Rosenbloom, New York Times)
The pressure from your peers are thus extended by the pressure to increase your influence, which all of us social media advisors are repeatedly emphasizing is essential to your personal and professional success. Either you’re influential, or you’re a nobody.
All-in. Fatigue. Full stop. Fade away. Dr Killjoy has entered the building.
The day after tomorrow
And here we are now, it’s the day after you could not stand it anymore. Your Twitter feed was filled to the rim with a couple of thousand of people who hungered for your attention, posting news, comments and retweets to the right and to the left… and above, beneath and beyond. You could not take it anymore and decided to turn it off for a while, to listen to the birds and enjoy the wind through your hair. At the end of the day, you only wanted to be you and not who everybody else was expecting you to be. And now what? You still want to be updated, but you just don’t have the stamina to stare at a constantly moving screen to get them.
The Twitter feed in itself will be too much to handle, and tools like Twingly Live even makes it harder to grasp when the situation is as grave as in Libya. There’s no possibility what-so-ever for one single person to follow what the entire world is writing under one hashtag. And when the news are of smaller magnitude, how are you supposed to even find the ones that interest you? Are you supposed to continually search for them, or to follow each and everyone in your area? No, there is a need for something else, an alternative where you could ensure that you get the news as quick as on Twitter, but with higher quality and relevancy.
You still need the Emanuels and Harises to be there and filter away the bad stuff, to tell you what is good and why you should read it. But you’ll also want to make your own comments and give them tips on either leads or how you would like the story to be followed up. All in direct connection to the news itself, not in a quick moving feed among thousands over other people and subjects. These trusted few will be counted on to listen, produce and narrate from a position close to the situation, as the absolute validity of the news cannot be guaranteed by someone sitting in a cabin thousands of miles from where the action is. Somehow, you need the combination of the quality assurance you get from most traditional media, but with the quickness, closeness and responsiveness of social media. You need to trust. You need facilitators.
We want Lassie
There’s no news that we can already see a clear trend of emerging tools for aggregating the news, be it in the iPad’s All-American app Flipboard or in ventures like Storify and Summify. While Flipboard and Summify is based on algorithms, I believe that Storify is onto something more interesting in terms of reaction driven innovation. Google’s complex search algorithms and Facebook and Twitter’s friend suggestions are fine and dandy, but we will want to see a more humane side soon. We won’t want something to technologically believe what we want to read. No, we will wish for someone made of flesh and blood, who can look us straight into our eyes and tell us with confidence that this is interesting and why.
We’ll beg for Lassie to run for help. Then we will ask her: “Okay, that was interesting! But have you thought about this angle, and what does other journalists and media have to say on the same subject? And is there a video clip that could prove what you say is correct?” We will continue along the path of consuming news vertically, focusing on the subject at hand and neglecting the boundaries set by the pages of a single newspaper, but with the spice of a little human touch to it.
We will want all of what current social media like Twitter bring to the table, but we won’t have any of the stress it induces. At least not when we look for news.
And the Twitter star will die and resurrect to become even more powerful as a facilitator on platforms that are yet to see the light of day. Maybe in the Liquid Newsroom that Steffen Konrath first proposed almost exactly one year ago?
