As Jason, Barry and I did with our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online during the 2007 federal election, I’m also posting the full text of the article here, in my original version. For what it’s worth, I much preferred my original title rather than the more anemic ‘All a-Twitter on the Campaign Trail’ that Fairfax’s sub-editors settled on…

Which Political Leader Would You Rather …?

By Axel Bruns

Tweet, that is. Internationally, the short-message social networking service Twitter itself has been used by a number of recent political contenders as a campaigning tool, with varying degrees of success; the Twitterati tend to get frustrated quickly by campaigns that merely use the system to push out PR messages, without any indication that there’s a real human being behind the account.

Hashtags, by contrast, are a way for the Twitter user community themselves to keep a distributed conversation going – by including a short tag like ‘#<topic>’ in their messages, they enable others with similar interests to follow only the tweets relevant to that topic.

Since the federal election was called, the hashtag ‘#ausvotes’ has emerged as the preferred way for users of Twitter to mark their election-related messages. An analysis of these tweets for the first full week of the campaign points to some interesting patterns.

Take, for example, the messages directed at Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. Both leaders have their own Twitter accounts – even if in reality it’s most likely their staffers who do the actual posting –, and many other users have directed their support or criticism to them by including ‘@juliagillard’ or ‘@tonyabbottmhr’ in their messages.

Interestingly, the Prime Minister has established a commanding lead over the opposition leader – in terms of #ausvotes tweets received (not counting retweeted messages), Gillard leads Abbott 74% to 26% to date. Of course, this is not exactly Twitter’s equivalent of the ‘preferred PM’ beauty contest which we know from the opinion polls, since those tweets are as likely to be positive as negative – but it’s intriguing to think that they may reflect the Twitterati’s assessment of who is more likely to win the election: after all, who’d want to be seen talking to the eventual loser?

A useful insight into the Twittersphere’s attitude towards the election campaign so far also comes from what messages Twitter users retweet – that is, pass along to their own networks. Unsurprisingly, news of the election itself ranked highly: indeed, @juliagillard herself has already won one contest with the nearly 200 retweets of her tweet

The election will be on 21 August. With your support I will move Australia forward. JG

Twitter was also used to for a few more or less tongue-in-cheek public service announcements:

RT @abcqanda: Use twitter to get voters enrolled. Deadline tomorrow. Retweet like crazy.

RT @Hashtag_Police: #ausvotes refers to the upcoming Australian election. #ozvotes refers to choosing a new Wizard.

At the same time, parties big and small had a much harder time getting their messages passed along. The @LiberalNSW’s message

It’s the SAME LABOR! Please retweet and show your support!

and the Greens’ @senatormilne’s alert that

Abbott is ignorant on #climate action - India already has a tax on coal

only managed some 20 retweets each, only marginally ahead of the @aussexparty at half that level:

Supporting @aussexparty in the #election? Please let everyone know with the hashtag #vote1sex

Some journalists also seized the opportunity to engage in a little informal opinion polling – @catherinedeveny’s message

RT this if you would vote for a party who promises to remove tax-exempt status for religions.

was passed along some 110 times, for what it’s worth.

But of course we’re still in the early days of the campaign, and along with the political organisations themselves, Twitter users, too, are still working out where this social media tool fits into the day-to-day business of electioneering. For now, at any rate, the comics seem to have it – one of the most retweeted messages by some margin was @unsungsongs’ play on Labor’s ubiquitous slogan:

I propose from now on we simply abbreviate "Moving Forward" to #MoFo

The Coalition didn’t come off unscathed, either – @electionsoz2010 stood up for Australia:

News: Tony Abbott names new Minister for Women: Mel Gibson

And even the ABC’s election analyst, @antonygreenabc, reported on a new milestone in moving forward:

Julia Gillard today passes Earle Page to become Australia’s 25th longest serving Prime Minister

While @courtney_gibson wondered about the constitutional dimensions of a Twitter election:

Under the terms of our Constitution does the GG get to approve the official hashtag?

But Twitter is a fast-paced beast, and as the parties finally outline their policy platforms for the election, we’re likely to see discussion under the #ausvotes tag become a good deal more pointed. Especially, of course, when the debate comes around – Australian Twitter users have a particular predilection for tweeting back at the TV, and are likely to switch straight between #masterchef and #ausvotes.

Assoc. Prof. Axel Bruns is a social media researcher in the ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. His blog is at http://snurb.info/.

Anyway, while trying to brush up some pretty rusty skills in quantitative data management and presentation, and gathering some figures on audiences across media, I discovered something today that seemed interesting.

That is: if we accept Morgan’s readership figures, it looks like the “crisis” of declining engagement with newspapers is pretty well entirely a metropolitan affair.

Here are a couple of graphs (produced in numbers - can’t access Excel from home!) I hope they visualise the claim above pretty clearly. They all deal with weekday readership of Australian newspapers.

The first shows the last two years of newspaper readership as per Morgan’s report last December. You’ll see I’ve divided up the market into national and metro papers and regional ones. I’ve included Hobart, The Gold Coast and Darwin in the regional group, not only because they approximate the profile of regional cities and media markets better than they do the 1 million people plus capitals, but because media industries treat them like regionals (in terms of ratings etc.). I’ve left Canberra in the metros section, partly because of its suburban profile, and partly because it’s the nation’s seat of power. I’m prepared to have a discussion about whether any of those decisions were wise!

What probably immediately strikes us here is the quantities metro and national papers sell in excess of regionals, but let’s leave that aside for a minute and focus on the changes in readership.

The next graph shows the readership of newspapers in 2008 and 2009 expressed as totals for national/metro and regional papers. Again, the metro totals dwarf the regionals, but you might note that while regional readership is basically flat, total metro readership can be seen to have declined a little.

We can compare the fate of individual national/metro papers and regionals a little more clearly if we look at changes in their readership in terms of percentages. This last graph offers percentage changes for newspapers, percentage changes for regionals and nationals/metros as a whole, and average changes in readership for nationals/metros.

This makes things clearer. Here we can see that all nationals/metros lost readers on weekdays between 2008 and 2009 except The Australian. Altogether, the nationals/metros lost around 5.9% of their readership, and on average they lost around 4.6%.

In the regions, though, it was a completely different story. Between 2008 and 2009, all told the regional newspapers remained steady, neither losing nor gaining readers. On average, they actually made a small gain in readership - around 0.75%.

Now we need to be cautious here - a lot of smaller regional and country newspapers aren’t included, I’ve got a lot more work to do across the range of statistics that Morgan and other organisations offer, and these are just building blocks in creating a more holistic view of regional mediascapes - the survey needs to be broader and longer.

That said: I’ve suggested more than once that the crisis of journalism has been getting a lot of airtime lately because metropolitan papers are in trouble, whereas the crisis in regional public spheres has happened over a much longer period, underneath the radar. This would need contextualising to connect to that argument, but the bit about the sudden decline in metro readerships looks pretty clear. What we see in this bunch of figures is a pretty profound change in the readership of national and metro papers over a year, accompanied by a steadiness in regional readerships. There’s more to do, but I reckon that’s a reasonably interesting outcome for an afternoon’s work.

Why is The Australian Women’s Weekly such a political graveyard? Cheryl Kernot’s feather boa, Mark Latham’s first wife, Tony Abbott fretting over daughters he barely knows - all underestimated the Weekly and all came an absolute gutser because of it. So much for broadsheets, Sunday morning talk shows and talkback radio, not to mention the national broadcaster and the utterly otiose press gallery. Watch out for the mighty Weekly, ye media advisors and image consultants, and tremble when they come for you.

He’s right to point it out: despite such a catalogue of woe, many political operators and journos don’t appear to take this giant-killing magazine seriously. But looking at the figures, you’d take a good run in the Weekly over favourable broadsheet coverage any day.

I was interested enough to look at the readership figures and demographics for the Weekly, and they tell an interesting story. Their readership is a staggering 2.2 million, meaning that about 13% of the population reads it - not even the Herald Sun comes close.

According to the figures in their press kit, the Weekly has a remarkably trans-demographic appeal, as well. There’s no major difference across the different demographic categories (A, B, etc.) , although they do pick up more older readers than younger ones. It gets its fair share of readers across different occupational classes. Although most readers are women, 465,000 men per month read it, which is up there with the total Monday-Friday readership of the Australian.

By the way, the magazines that many of us focus on (and occasionally obsess about) as organs of public affairs are utterly trounced by the Weekly. Morgan has The Monthly, for example, at 100,000 readers. (That figure - around 100-200K - keeps coming up when we look at audiences for those media products which we might see as appealing to media/news junkies.)

The Weekly is a colossus, that really does reach an incredibly wide sweep of Australian voters. Looking bad in it means looking bad to a lot of people. For a man who is struggling with women voters, Tony Abbott has at the very least taken a huge risk with his comments. If they really were off the cuff, and really do hurt him, he will come to regret going unprepared to an encounter with the Weekly, one of Australia’s most important political publications.

To reiterate Mr Elder’s question - one that of course many feminists asked before either of us did - why aren’t magazines like the Weekly taken more seriously, more often,by more journos, scholars and political junkies, as both public sphere institutions, and as places where politics happens?

I use Townsville as a case-study, and argue that the regional public sphere there has declined over many years, to the detriment (and chagrin) of citizens there, and yet despite a level of Internet service provision that’s often comparable with the capitals, people haven’t engaged with the opportunities of public sphere blogging. This is a problem, then, that big fat cables alone won’t fix. I suggest we need to think about the role of creative clusters and intermediary institutions, and think about ABC Open in that light.

This will be the first in a series of articles that talk about the regional uptake of tools for public sphere engagement. I think that we are too often technologically-determinist when we think about things like the NBN investment, and we too seldom think about who’s excluded from online public spheres. I think there are systematic silences generated by our “networked public sphere” in Australia - future pieces will use empirical tools to investigate this.

Anyway, it’s embedded as a Scribd document below the fold. Comments welcome, and I’ll let you know whether it gets through peer review.

Oh, but please don’t quote it at this point without letting me know.

The Quiet North

Coalition All Atwitter over Climate Change

The extraordinary events in the Liberal party room over the past few days are destined to enter the annals of Australian politics for a number of reasons - not least because of the unprecedented flow of up-to-the-minute, first-hand, indeed first-person information through the short messaging service Twitter to the waiting journalists and the wider public beyond.

News about the latest statements for and against the CPRS from individual MPs, and updates on the numbers supporting or opposing Malcolm Turnbull were received and retweeted within seconds of their arrival, and at times one could form the impression that those waiting for a resolution had a better sense of Turnbull’s numbers than the Opposition Leader himself.

Finally, Turnbull’s antics at his press conferences, and the statements of politicians and pundits during various subsequent interviews, also found an instant audience of commentators, often responding to blatant inaccuracies and naked spin in the way they wished journalists would.

The ABC’s Managing Director Mark Scott - himself an avid Twitter convert in recent months, tweeting at @abcmarkscott - and managers and journalists in other news organisations are right to re-think their practices in a way that makes effective use of such new forms of communication, much as earlier generations of journalists would have adjusted to the telegraph, the telephone, the newswire, the satellite feed, or email.

The instant updates, the direct access to sources, the ad hoc exchanges which Twitter and similar services enable can be a powerful addition to the journalistic toolkit, and a significant means for informing and mobilising the masses - for alerting them of a need to flee devastating bushfires or for organising them in street protests against the stolen Iranian elections, to name just two recent examples.

But especially against the backdrop of such major events, it’s important not to lose perspective. In the clear light of day, for example, Lateline’s Tony Jones would hopefully himself cringe at his comparison on Tuesday of the tweets of indecision emanating from the Liberal lair with the role of Twitter in the continuing Iranian protest movement; not all uses of Twitter are revolutionary and game-changing.

Similarly, it is especially important for journalists not to be drawn into, to be subsumed by, the tweet-and-retweet information flow of Twitter: we should be able to expect more from our journalists than just to instantly pass along incoming information of whatever provenance to a larger group of followers. Journalism should begin at this point, not end here.

But much of the journalism Australians were able to witness this week was just that - a breathless coverage of process, a counting and recounting of who said what and which side appeared to have the votes, rather than a serious engagement with the substance of the CPRS bill, the amendments being added, and the wider context of Australia’s response to the threat of climate change. Lateline and all the other shows reporting on the political events of the day did little more than repeat - retweet - the pithy comments which journalists and others had already made to each other as they day unfolded.

Such failings are excusable in the face of the extraordinary political theatre which is playing out at the moment, perhaps, but unfortunately they are not confined to a handful of such special days - even at the best of times, much of the Canberra commentariat generally appears to be more interested in reporting the latest leadership machinations within opposition ranks than in providing an insightful critique of government policy. (Their coverage of the 2020 Summit, a policyfest par excellence, was ominous in this context - here, more column inches were spent on the use of butchers’ paper, and on whether the PM sat on the floor, than on what was actually discussed.)

By enabling an instantaneous, downright hyperactive mode of communication as it does, there’s a danger that Twitter will further emphasise process over substance. In the right hands, it is an important tool for tracking the Zeitgeist, checking information, and accessing a wide range of source quickly and easily; in the hands of a journalist who is already struggling with time pressures and the need to produce copy, however, there is a real fear that the independent, fearless analysis and interpretation of events which should be at the heart of journalistic work will fall further by the wayside.

And there’s also a danger that the tweetback loop between politicians, pundits, and journalists becomes even more self-contained, even more disconnected from everyday life. Already, some in the Liberal party room seem no better able to withstand the incessant ‘Spill! Spill! Spill!’ calls from their Twitter posse than Gold Coast schoolies can cope with the ‘Skull! Skull! Skull!’ from their peers - resulting in similar self-inflicted damage. Having a retinue of enthusiastic Twitter followers doesn’t mean you have the numbers in the party room, or the support of the general public.

Twitter is no substitute for real engagement with the Australian public, for real research into the best solutions to the challenges facing the nation. There is no doubt that modern journalists and politicians worth their salt need to be on Twitter, and need to be connected to any number of other key media sources as well. It’s when they come to believe that all they need to do is to tweet and retweet that the problems start - for journalism, and for the society which it aims to inform.

Dr Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology. He’s the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, blogs at snurb.info , and tweets at @snurb_dot_info .

Technorati : ABC Unleashed, Australia, Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, Twitter, climate change, politics
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I’m already on record as saying that I think that - outside niche markets - Murdoch’s paywall plans are doomed to fail, and fail miserably; most news users simply don’t care enough about NewsCorp’s specific flavour of news to prefer it so much that they’d be willing to pay money for it, if much the same material is also available for free elsewhere. (If this report from Forrester is right, Murdoch should certainly think twice about what he’s proposing to do.) I’ve also been less than convinced by those commentators who say that the ABC’s plans for a stronger embrace of user-generated content, and the gradual or not-so-gradual decline of commercial news organisations, are ‘bad for journalism’, for two reasons:

a) because in most commercial news publications, a majority of content is already sourced from a small handful of newswires - actual journalism has long ceased to take place where this is the case, and if we are concerned about the lack of diversity in our news, we should have been so well before the arrival of Web news as a new form of competition; and

b) because in all the widely publicised statements and speeches from Scott and others at the ABC, there’s nothing to suggest that as it engages more thoroughly with user-generated content, the ABC will simultaneously wind back the operations of its own newsroom - indeed, the ABC remains today in a very exclusive club of Australian news organisations which still have a strong network of professional journalists right across the country, and around the world.

(There’s also an undercurrent of grumblings about the future of investigative journalism - as if Australian commercial news organisations had a particularly proud history in that field or were somehow uniquely qualified for it. Let’s get real here: investigative journalism can be incredibly important, but the few genuine success stories in recent years - say, reporting on the Australian Wheat Board scandal by Caroline Overington, before the trainwreck - are vastly outnumbered by partisan smear campaigns and exposés or ACA-style dumpster-diving. In the current debate, at any rate, the ideal of ‘investigative journalism’ is invoked all too often by superannuated ex-journos who hark back to a better time that never was, and have forgotten the harsh realities of commercial journalism as it is.)

But anyway - my purpose here isn’t so much to add yet another voice to an already unwieldy debate, but to pull together and document some of the key statements to date. Make up your own minds. So:

• ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s much-publicised AN Smith Lecture at the University of Melbourne on 14 August 2009, “Media after Empire”, outlines his critique of the remaining mainstream media empires’ response to the shifting environment in general, and of Rupert Murdoch’s paywall plans in particular. (Sadly, the University of Melbourne seems closer in attitude to Rupert than to Mark, and doesn’t offer the video of Scott’s speech in an embeddable, shareable version, so here’s the link only… And here’s a transcript of the speech.)

• Rupert Murdoch’s interview with Sky News Australia’s David Speers on 6 November 2009, responding in part to the criticism by Mark Scott (while habitually throwing in a couple of ad hominems against Scott):
  
  

• Mark Scott again, this time at the Media 140 conference in Sydney on 5/6 Nov. 2009, outlining the ABC’s social media strategy and introducing the ABC Open initiative (Scott’s introduction starts at around 18.15 minutes into the video - skip forward, but be patient with UStream’s less than responsive video player); here are Scott’s slides, too.
  
  

• Finally, there’s also a radio interview with ABC News Director Kate Torney on Inside Story from around the same time, as Margaret Simons has pointed out. Worth checking out to get more sense of the specifics of how newsrooms are changing.

Technorati : ABC, ABC Open, Rupert Murdoch, online news, paywall, social media
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the disruptive nature of ‘real-time’ social media looking at tools such as Twitter, live-blogging, facebook and other social networking tools as they rapidly transform the media in real-time.

I’ve been invited by way of the good people at newmatilda.com, where I occasionally pass comment on such topics.

Each speaker gets five minutes, and below the fold I’ve reproduced the text of something like what I’ll say tomorrow. Actually, this is more like what I would say I had the chance - there’s another couple of hundred words that need to come out of there by my calculations.

Comments and feedback most welcome - I was asked to speak on the Iranian elections and social media, and I’ve tried to address myself to what I saw as an overemphasis in some assessments on the specific role of Twitter in those events.

For those who are going - I’ll see you there.

Today I’m here to talk about Twitter and it’s relationship with ongoing events in Iran, though I think the catalyst for this part of Media 140 was the prominence of Twitter around the the time of the Iranian elections earlier this year. It’s a complicated thing to address in a few minutes: here goes. In my few minutes, I’ll suggest that the events in Iran revealed a lot about Twitter’s affordances and constraints as a platform; that Twitter was part of a range of communications platforms and strategies that were important; and that we need to be careful about the way in which we think about this platform. I bring a few different perspectives to this discussion - my doctoral training was in media history, I’ve worked as a practitioner on online e-democracy and citizen journalism projects, and I was asked as someone who comments publicly on media, new media and politics in New Matilda. I’m an avid Twitter user, but I should say that I should say is that I’ll try to be an analyst rather than an evangelist, not least because I feel like media companies are capable of doing the latter job for themselves.

Twitter’s affordances first: it was amazing to watch, at the time, how people, here in Australia and elsewhere, were mobilised using this technology to talk about, and emotionally invest in, political events in a faraway country. It was extraordinary to read in real time, on a public feed, commentary from people who were inside the country, and directly involved in these events. It would be churlish to doubt that there was a genuine expression of empathy for Iranian protesters on the part of many in, for example, the greening of avatars, and in their willingness to spread scarce information from within Iran as widely as possible using twitter. Some examples of mainstream media coverage of the event - and famously CNN’s - appeared feeble beside what was happening in real-time on my feed. But what was seldom mentioned was how great it was to be able to get real-time, expert commentary from experienced journalists and Iran-watchers like the ABC’s own Mark Colvin. There was a brief, shining moment where it seemed that Twitter helped people to establish a different kind of relationship with major geopolitical events than is allowed by broadcast media. It also seemed qualitatively different from my own prior experiences of produser-driven, web-based platforms, and the best way I can describe for the moment is this is that it seemed more intense - perhaps because of its real-time, communal aspects.

Nevertheless, the claims some people made for Twitter, especially in the heat of the moment, were too bold. Crediting twitter alone with driving events in Iran risked writing out, just for a start, the long history of the Iranian/Farsi political blogosphere. This is extensive and diverse, and is the venue for, among other things, complex political debate that belies the somewhat simplistic, black hats and white hats version of events that some seemed willing to accept on Twitter. If any one web-based technology has political consciousness-raising in Iran in recent years, if any mere communications platform can be connected with the brave decision of so many to put their bodies on the line in the streets, it’s the blogs. We know how large Iran’s largely blog-based online public sphere is, and how crucial it has been in preserving a space for dissent and debate in the face of a state that doesn’t tend to encourage such things. Iranian people weren’t waiting around for Twitter as a focus for their dissent.

Further, a lot of the protest organising that was done via social networks was accomplished, in a straightforward one-to-many, broadcast fashion, using announcements from Facebook groups associated with candidates. One wonders why this wasn’t mentioned more, and how much this has to do with the media hype cycle that picks up one technology at a time. Within Iran, where the government moved quickly to limit and monitor Internet use, word of mouth played a role in organising protest. The point is that when we get too excited about the newest platform, we fail to recognise that most political action is interwoven with a whole ecology of information and communication practices. Twitter gave us a new way to track events, but we weren’t confronting the Iranian state.

There was some overemphasis on Twitter here was also too little said regarding what these events revealed about Twitter’s limitations as a tool of political protest and communication. One thing to focus on briefly is how the value-neutrality and accessibility of a tool like Twitter is a two-way street, as is the absence of gatekeepers. If information is highly spreadable, so too are simple errors and deliberate falsehoods. It’s much easier to retweet something than it is to check whether its true. It’s very difficult to ensure over time that people communicating from inside a country in turmoil are who they say they are. Life and death situations throw all of this into some relief. I’ve previously advocated the position that digital literacy for social networks needs to encompass some of the attitude to sources and facts that the ideal version of journalistic practice embodies, but that’s a longer conversation.

The rhetoric surrounding twitter at the moment is very familiar to media historians, and resembles what’s greeted the emergence of every medium throughout industrial modernity. That’s not to underestimate Twitter’s usefulness, it’s just to say that this revolution has been announced before. There are some fallacies of futurology that recur when new media arrive. New media are always seen as superseding their predecessors, but very few media technologies disappear from use in any simple way. they persist alongside emerging ones, because they still have applications. New media are always seen as more transparent - and that is less mediating than their predecessors - but when we settle down we usually realise that no medium is a pure avenue of information; each one is used to select and frame events in specific ways. New media are often seen as democratising, but what do we mean by that exactly, beyond a normative endorsement. In fact, they tend to gather unique publics, and there’s enough research about social networks now to suggest that they have specific audience, and are capable of exclusion as well as inclusion. The last thing to say about Iran, then, is that although that election may have been stolen, Ahmedinijad has a constituency, disproportionately they are rural and poor, and altogether they’re the last people who are likely to fish up on twitter, and thus the last we would have heard from during conflict around the election. We here today are a specific group marked by specific privileges, and the Twitter user-base is not as inclusive as we might like to think. We need to be reflexive about the nature of its networks when we think about this platform as a source of information.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve just published an article on this topic at ABC Unleashed (and reproduced over the fold). Comments - and suggestions for more workable approaches to introducing a bloggers’ code of ethics, if you have any - are very welcome, as always.

King Canute’s New Guidelines for Bloggers

Reports from the US that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is updating its consumer protection guidelines to curb paid-for promotional blogging practices point both to the continuing impact of well-known bloggers on their users’ opinions, and to the outdated understanding of new and social media platforms that continues influence the thinking of regulators and industry.

On the one hand, of course, finding ways to eradicate the practice of some bloggers singing the praises of new products or services but failing to acknowledge the fact that they’ve received freebies or other kickbacks from the companies offering these products is a worthy goal; anyone outraged by Australian talk-back radio’s own ‘cash for comments’ scandal a few years back would likely applaud these similar efforts to increase transparency and encourage full disclosure.

At the same time, however, much as ‘cash for comments’ ultimately amounted to little more than a slap on the wrists for a few of the principal protagonists, so it is difficult to see how the FTC’s new guidelines could effectively police the US or international blogospheres, if for different reasons. Misconduct in the Australian commercial broadcasting industry tends to generate no more than token repercussions because industry self-regulation mechanisms are carefully designed to be ineffective, but at least such mechanisms do exist - they are set up and controlled by the handful of major industry players in the country who have long recognised that self-regulation is infinitely preferable to government oversight.

In the online environments of the blogosphere and in other open, global, many-to-many media systems based upon Web technologies, by comparison, the structure of the industry is far less clear and manageable. The FTC’s guidelines may be able to exert some pressure towards good behaviour on the major commercial content providers in these spaces, but it is very difficult to imagine that they could effectively police the myriad of independent, individual bloggers, some of whom (in spite of their lack of industry backing) do amass large numbers of followers and may thus become just as influential as corporate-backed blogs.

It is fanciful to think that this vast community of bloggers would take notice of or care about the FTC’s guidelines, nor that the penalties of up to US$11,000 which it threatens for breaches of the rules could act as an effective deterrent to bloggers determined to make a quick buck through stealthy product endorsements - if anything, the pressure exerted by such threats may just lead such bloggers to move sideways and operate their blogs from a safe haven outside the US.

Positing such guidelines is one thing, then, but attempting to enforce them on rank-and-file bloggers is quite another. In attempting to do so, the FTC reveals that its mindset remains anchored in a simpler past, characterised by a more manageable media landscape. In that past, ‘media’ and ‘audiences’ were distinctly different entities, and to operate media outlets was a privilege from which stemmed great obligations of transparency and disclosure, rightly (though not always effectively) policed by the FTC and its equivalent organisations around the world.

Today, on the other hand, we’re all creating and sharing media content, all of the time, whether through our blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook accounts, or a vast array of other social media tools. It’s a fact of life that the FTC is not alone in having a hard time coming to terms with; a more spectacular example for the same failure to adjust to a changing reality is provided by Rupert Murdoch’s witless railing against anyone from Google News to the individual blogger who links to and thus shares the precious information published by News Ltd. outlets, and by his suicidal intention to quarantine all such content from potential users behind a paywall.

What neither Murdoch nor FTC appear to understand is that the operating logic of this transforming mediaspace is one of sharing. Sharing confers authority by highlighting some morsel of information as worth passing on, worth reading, and - far from seeking to undermine it - Murdoch should encourage it as it increases the currency and reach of his news publications. Sharing also allows different bits of information, different takes on the same issue, to ride up against one another, and acts as an effective mechanism for debunking misinformation - the more divergent two stories on the same matter, the more there is a need for the user to engage in close reading and make up their own minds about an issue.

And it is this, not FTC guidelines, which ultimately tends to ensure transparency and disclosure in the only apparently so unruly spaces of the blogosphere and the wider Web: especially the articles published by the most followed and most influential bloggers are shared most widely and read most critically, and - far from being mere consumers of information - their users are now actively identifying and highlighting signs of bias in their coverage. Any blogger who wilfully and egregiously breaches that unspoken covenant of transparency between themselves and their user community will very swiftly find themselves on the wrong end of a barrage of tweets, comments, and other missives denouncing their lack of disclosure.

What results is a kind of crowdsourced, bottom-up transparency, rather than the top-down transparency imposed from above which the FTC is attempting to introduce. Occasional exceptions from the rule notwithstanding, the blogosphere is actually quite resilient at guarding itself against overtly commercially biased interference; put simply, blog users tend to have a pretty good bullshit meter. And the consequence for any blogger found wanting by this measure is not a threat of financial penalties, but the far more significant loss of social capital within the reputation economy of the blogosphere.

Technorati : FTC, USA, blogs, cash for comment, ethics, regulation
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From the CFP for EDEM 2010:

EDem10

4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010

EDem10 focuses on these changes which can be seen occurring in different areas and which are manifest in different way:

• Transparency & Communication (freedom of information, free information access, openness, information sharing, blogging, micro-blogging, social networks, data visualization, eLearning, empowering, …);
• Participation & Collaboration (innovation malls, innovation communities, bottom up, top down, social networks, engagement and accountability, collaborative culture, collaboration between C2C, G2C, …);
• Architecture, Concepts & Effects (access and openness, user generated content, peer production, network effects, power laws, long tail, harnessing the power of the crowd, crowd sourcing, social web, semantic web, …);
• Different Fields : open government initiatives, eDemocracy, eParticipation, eVoting, eDeliberation;
• Approaches and Disciplines : law & legal studies, social sciences, computer sciences, political sciences, psychology, sociology, applied computer gaming and simulation, democratic theory, media and communication sciences;
• Multidisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Approaches;
• Research Methods.

I realise that some of the rhetoric behind e-government and e-democracy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (and frankly, my eyes glaze over every time I hear someone singing the praises of electronic voting systems), but happily, EDEM is organised as a very broad church which is very deliberately focussed around e-democracy overall (importantly, also including activities in the NGO sector) rather than simply around e-government or e-governance. Do consider putting in a paper - submissions close on 21 December 2009.

Technorati : CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media
Del.icio.us : CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media

You can find a full call for applications over at snurb.info - please pass it on to anyone who may be interested. And remember that applications for Australian students close on 30 September, for international students on 9 October…

Technorati : ABC, CCi, PhD, creative industries, innovation, produsage, public broadcasting, social media
Del.icio.us : ABC, CCi, PhD, creative industries, innovation, produsage, public broadcasting, social media