Wikinomics - A short rant (part 1)

In the first year of my undergraduate degree, I wrote an essay in which I crowed about how much free music I was downloading off the internet, and how this was the start of some drastic shift in production and society at large. Although it received a fairly good mark, I eventually admitted to myself that the essay contained some fairly half baked ideas and, acknowledging that file sharing amounted more or less to theft, I locked many of them away.

Only now, having read Wikinomics, am I tempted to release the information anarchist that has been quietly hotboxing my bad arguments cupboard for the last few years.

"You're free to go. Dom Tapscott and Anthony D Williams say you haven't been doing anything wrong and that as a N-Gen citizen you're actually helping to renegotiate the definition of copyright and intellectual property. Now find me a pirate copy of Chinese Democracy."

Of course the book isn't just about filesharing, and it's considerably less half baked than my first year sociology essay. Wikinomics is about the potential of peer production in a world where information flows more freely, and people can collaborate more easily than ever before thanks to the internet. Check the Wikinomics blog or read the book if you want the details. I'm going to concentrate on the ideas which relate most strongly to news production and thus to public relations.

In Wikinomics there are two key ways in which news is changing as a result of the internet. Firstly, internet users are becoming producers of news, creating content on blogs, Wikipedia, Twitter and the like. Secondly they are becoming editors of preprepared news content. I will talk about the former in this post, leaving discussion of the latter for another time.

Tapscott and Williams cite the Wikipedia page about the July 7th London bombings as an example of how Wiki technology can organise information about an event more quickly and effectively than standard news gathering agencies. They state that cocreation of news by various internet users will give rise to "balance, fairness and accuracy" in news reports, as well as making them "more dynamic".

I have already expressed excitement on this blog about how multi-layered news content can make the media experience more dynamic. However, it does seem a little optimistic to assume that accuracy and balance (read 'journalistic quality') will naturally arise from citizen reporting. This is especially the case if organisations are excluded from the conversation, as Wikipedia has stipulated they should be, and if there is no quality control on the information being published. Certainly public perceptions of user-created news are relatively poor. The BBC website received widespread criticism for its use of Twitter during the Mumbai attacks, with some users feeling that it had sacrificed its journalistic integrity by using Tweets as a news source, and not sufficiently differentiating it from other content.

So in line with another one of my previous posts, it seems that mistrust is rife on the internet - both towards organisations and individual users - with people continuing to value more traditional media sources. Mass collaboration can work where people have a clearly defined task, and don't have political axes to grind or conspiracies to propogate. Unfortunately news sites have no such direction, and like a sweaty crevice, provide fertile breeding ground for rumour, speculation and prejudice. This, understandably, is a turnoff for many people seeking quality news coverage.

For the moment, this remains good news for the PR industry, which retains privileged access to trusted media outlets. But equally it cuts off opportunities for all of us in terms of getting continuing access to highly integrated, multi sourced and interactive news content. So if trust is the issue, how can this be addressed?

Simply, providers of internet information services should encourage greater accountability of their users. In the same way that journalists can be held accountable for information they publish, so too should any internet user who claims to be in possession of the facts. A good first step has been made by Twitter, which encourages people to set up accounts in their own name and to use photographs of their face as a profile picture - a progression from the shifty alter egos that riddled the old web. Of course this need for transparency extends to public relations practitioners, for as long as PRs are creeping around on the internet posting misleading items under false identities the wound of mistrust will continue to gape (and we'll continue to be banned from Wikipedia!).