The debate over the future of media continues but one thing is for sure, it’s too soon to rip-up the editorial model.
The sheer volume of conversation taking place around the Iranian election result are cluttering up channels and making it impossible to hear voices that are coming directly from the country. On social networks from Flickr to Twitter messages of sympathy and support are generating huge volumes of noise.
Broadstuff’s Alan Patrick reckons that it’s a new type of spam:
[…] a new type of spam is born, “whuffiespam” where the aim is to jump on to a good cause and get social capital by being visibly (and risibly) more caring than thou.
An editorial function would separate the signal from the noise and rate the integrity of the source. It would also stop the nonsense seen yesterday from HabitatUK which has hijacked popular Twitter tags with promotional spam.
Alan reckons that this is the Future of Twitterspam. Better get used to it – or overlay an editorial model.
Wadds, as well as editorial (or Curation, as it is called in 2009
) there will need for automated filtering to deal with the scale imho.
Being able to spot changes of colour on avatars wouldn’t hurt either
great point made. the fact of the matter is without trained journalists to provide both sides of the argument the only ‘winners’ would be those who shout loudest and we regress as a result.
on Twitter I think the #unfollow option should be exercised with greater abandon so that serial offenders get the message…
I was thinking this the other day. The Iran tweets, in particular, were really suffering from this – I contributed some myself until I started to realise that I was just adding to the noise.
A pair of possible solutions that I’ve thought deeply about for, oooh, 15 seconds each. So feel free to pick holes – this is the bluest of blue skies stuff.
1. Power Tweeters (yeuuch) make it their business to diversify and define channels. So, for example, messages of sympathy and support could have gone to #supportiran rather than #iranelection. Clogging channels becomes a social media faux pas.
The problem with this is that people like to *feel involved*. That’s the great draw of social media, but also, in this context, it’s major weakness. The flame gets snuffed out by the beating of the wings of all the moths around it.
2. Trending topics are ranked using more sophisticated algorithm than simple volume. Could trending-topic tweets have a thumbs up/thumbs down icon, with the search results displaying some sort of balance between real-time and best-value (as decided by the crowd) tweets?
Solution one is crowdsourced, solution two is top-down tech-imposed. I think if social media – not just Twitter – are going to retain their value they need to remain flexible and crowd-based. In so far as possible, behaviours have to change as a result of crowd-developed standards and mores. Anything that takes freedom away from the user is going to dent the popularity and usefulness of any social medium that implements it.
Social media is still very young and I reckon we’re very much in its adolescent phase (if we’re even there yet). It’s very shouty, and the group hasn’t worked out the best way to deal with problematic behaviour. I’m not sure a solution can be imposed – it might have to evolve.