December 17, 2004, 8.44am • 36 comments » • 1,777 Views

Opposites attract

It’s occurred to me that there is an important disconnect in the way the mainstream and the underground media treat “interactivity” or “participation” or “citizen journalism” or whichever.

The big buzz for online media right now is that citizen journalism is ushering in a new era of collaborative, ground-up, democratic news production from the army of regular people, ordinary news footsoldiers out in the patches. As demonstrated by Rathergate and other instances, these footsoldiers are actually making news.

When mainstream news media deploy similar technologies, however, the resulting product is very different. Sky News may ask for “your views” by email, text or in a poll; BBC Radio Five Live may want your contributions in what seems like a 24-hour news phone-in - but their solicitations rarely produce anything but response.

How useful is it to me when Sky News or the BBC or any of the large news organisations announce “we’ll now take a look at what you think of this story”? Not useful at all. I didn’t respond to the story, I may not have a view on it. This is the traditional news broadcaster’s conception of interactivity, one which views the audience as a massified single entity. Therefore, any use of new media by the audience produces not a multitude of views, but a batch of feedback an editor labels “interactive”.

Back in the 90s, before the grassroots journalism wave had built, it was all about “interactivity”… “hey man, the audience will be at one with us!” Well, no - the ways in which mainstream news uses these technologies is nothing like interactivity; it’s reactivity. As Grahame Meikle notes in Future Active that “interactivity” is an outmoded concept - once promising but bastardised by Big Media control and naivete - now superceded by “intercreativity”.

And it’s intercreativity which the new citizen journalism, grassroots news, journoblogging or Wikinews now relies upon.

The oddly jarring disjuncture is this - participation in mainstream news usually produces only vapid opinion, whilst participation in online news efforts often produce news itself.

The two models are coming at each other in this surprising way. And it’s doubtless because professional journalists at the news organisations are better, more experienced journalists than the footsoldiers; they’re there to find, research and communicate the stories and that’s fine. User contributions to this mainstream news are rare… amateur video of news events, eyewitness accounts on live radio via mobile phone.

It’s clear that mainstream news is striving for real people, whilst the real people are striving to be mainstream news.