Is this a Big Deal? Hysteria, Social Media, and the News

I am watching, listening, and reading (and now writing) about a news story as it unfolds: a gunman has shot himself in the undergrad library of UTexas. The story is especially salient to me because I'm going there for a conference tomorrow, I spent two years there as a Master's student, and I know a fair amount of people who live there, some of which attend the university.

This event (which may be in the past or may still be occurring, depending on whether reports of a second gunman who has yet to be apprehended are true) came to my attention through reddit. I woke up, fixed breakfast, watched a little Sportscenter on ESPN, and then opened my computer to go online. Although I have my browser homepage set to the NYTimes, I rarely start a day by opening a browser but instead click on a bookmarked page from my already-open browser, usually checking my email or going to reddit first out of habit and out of a desire for self-relevant information (email) and appealing, brief distractions (reddit). So if, say, some event of great consequence were to happen, it is likely that I would find out about it this way. But if it were truly of GREAT consequence (e.g. 9/11), I would've found out about it either on NPR (which I flipped on when I was barely awake, as is my habit) or ESPN.

So there was the headline on reddit: Shooter at University of Texas library RIGHT NOW. Rather than click on the link or the comments, I went to NYTimes to corroborate it. Oddly, the story didn't appear to be there. I thought that the shooter maybe didn't kill anyone, or that it was a hoax. But then, buried in smaller headlines on the page, I saw mention of it. I read that story and it said that the gunman fired shots and killed himself, but no mention of anyone else being hurt. I then turned on CNN and, oddly, they weren't talking about it. Neither was Fox News. Other news stations were playing commercials.

I didn't have all the details of this story, but the fact that it wasn't plastered all over the front page of the Times and that CNN wasn't covering it at that moment led me to this conclusion: it is not a big deal. Because of the lack of coverage, it is extremely unlikely that anyone I know was hurt in anyway as a result of this event. It would be safe for me to assume that everything was fine with them, everything was fine with me going there tomorrow, and that everything would, in general, be fine.

This is not the picture that I got when I went to Facebook and twitter. Many people in my online social network have connections to UT, and so many of them posted links to news stories about the shooting, just within the last hour, with very little supplementary information other than brief declarations of fear or concern. With twitter, I had to search for Austin, UT, but the result is the same: brief expressions of fear, rumors of a second shooter still on the loose. From this information, it seemed like a big deal, a huge deal. Reading my Facebook feed, I was...well, not necessarily gripped with fear or concern, but I got the impression that I needed to keep monitoring the situation out of concern for people I knew and to see if I would still be traveling to Austin tomorrow. If I watched mainstream media, I wouldn't get that feeling. I would get the feeling that I could relax and go back to work.

There's this narrative that mainstream media is too big, too ad-supported, to get at the truth. The truth percolates up from the blogosphere, from citizen journalists. If this story isn't covered by CNN or NYTimes right away, its because they're slow moving dinosaurs who just got scooped, and they don't know what's really important but instead promote the values of their sponsors. But here, in terms of "level of appropriate concern," I think that the mainstream media has it right. If I step back and look at the situation, at least what I know of the situation (seems like an isolated, botched shooting, not a coordinated, successful attack by several people), the appropriate reaction is: don't panic, its okay, no one is in more danger than they were a day ago. I just don't get this from the little social network newsfeed that's evolved over the past few years. There have been legitimate criticisms of coverage of disasters like 9/11 and Katrina saying that certain frames used in the coverage gave viewers the impression that there was more panicking and more reason for panicking than there really were. I've had this feeling before about bias in the news, but I think it applies here, too: you thought this was a problem when mainstream interests were handling reporting the news? Just wait until 'the people' start doing the reporting.

I think that in some cases, crowdsourcing news helps information get out faster and that the crowd can, counter to our intuition, promote the accurate, relevant information over the inaccurate information in an efficient manner, more efficiently than MSM. But the emotion that seeps into our facebook feeds, the undiluted fear that cannot help but contaminate our accounts of our experiences and is being mistaken for "news", doesn't move us any closer to gaining an accurate impression of what the true risk is to our selves and people we know and love when a bad thing happens. Its self-relevant and is provided by many different people, and thus appeals to us as "truth," but its laden with emotions that aren't present in detached MSM accounts of events. One may say that those emotions are part of the truth of an event. That sounds good, but I think that emotional reporting of an event as it is happening is likely to be associated with overestimates of how threatening the event is to our selves and others (I'll avoid using the loaded term "hysteria").

One thing that really stuck with me about the coverage of 9/11 was the strangely detached monotone of many of the anchors as we all watched the World Trade Centers collapse. Certainly not the way twitter would've handled it. I feel like this change has happened in the past couple of years and that it is significant: many people no longer turn on the TV when disaster strikes. They go online. Online promises more viewpoints, more immediate updates, deeper and broader accounts of everything. Which is better? Which is truer? Which leads to worry and which leads to action?

Flow Conference 2008: What We're All Thinking/Watching

One last thought on something that Joshua Green said at my roundtable at this year's Flow Conference: the visibility of ratings, of what we believe to be popular, is part of nation-building and imagined community building through mass media. If we see that American Idol is a highly rated program, then we’ll watch it to be part of that cultural zeitgeist and we’ll believe it to be a reflection (for better or worse, inclusively or exclusively) of what it means to be American. It occurs to me that the numbers are so much more important to all of us as viewers trying to understand what our culture is and how it thinks and what our places are in it now than they were in the past precisely because there are millions of media options today that we can all share with one another.

50 years ago, there were three networks, 5 to 20 radio stations per market, and a handful of movies at the theater at a given time. If you wanted to get an idea of what America was thinking, what its passions were, how it felt about an external threat or its future or its past, you had limited resources from which to draw from. The three networks gave you an idea of what your fellow citizens were thinking (nevermind the fact that they probably didn’t arrive on those thoughts on their own and that the cultural preoccupations on display were the preoccupations of coastal elites or what those elites imagined the public might be thinking or wanting). We had a shared consciousness. It was a shared consciousness that was forced upon us, but a shared one nonetheless.

Today, with the wealth of outlets and content available to the individual (working on some hard data w/ Russ Neuman to back this up), there is no de facto shared consciousness. That is, it is not dictated by the limits of technology and communications infrastructure and economy in the way that it was 50 years ago. And yet we still want to know what our fellow citizens (or fellow humans all over the planet) are thinking about. How do we know what they’re thinking about? Ratings. That represents the need for accurate ratings, not from the advertisers, the networks, or the creators, but from us, the viewers. Now more than ever, in a world where there is no de facto shared consciousness, we look to the ratings as a way to tell us what others are thinking and where we stand in that larger community.

Flow Conference 2008: Thoughts on Media Metrics

After a day at the Flow conference, I’m reminded of how good this conversational round-table format can be. The Narrative Franchises panel was amazing: 40 or 50 people in the room, some of which were experts in the field who probably knew more and thought more deeply about the this phenomenon than anyone else on the planet, and instead of just throwing out self-indulgent tangents about their ultra-specific area of interest (as often happens at academic gatherings), they were contributing information or viewpoints that were totally relevant to the discussion, fleshing out the picture we had a franchises with examples, considering exceptions to rules and considering whether they constituted the re-write of those rules. I got the feeling we were building a larger understanding of the phenomenon than any of us came in with. It reminded me of the kind of collaboration that I thought could only happen online.

Media metrics (the most famous of which is Nielsen TV ratings) are to be thought of as currency, like money, or degrees on a thermometer. They provide a universal, transferable, singular standard by which we measure the value of something.

What creators really want to know is: what combination of textual characteristics and audience characteristics lead to more people buying an advertised product within that text and/or paying for the text itself? Whether or not certain people choose to watch a show or see a movie at a given time is an imperfect measure of that. The perfect measure would: not just measure whether or not someone was tuned in, but what was going on in their heads (look to transportation measures for this). It would also measure whether they viewed something at any given time (look to Tivo data for this). It would also measure the degree to which they talked about the content with their friends (look to optimedia’s measurements of buzz, or searches like Technorati that could tell you what people are blogging about, but also take valence into account). It would take into account previous viewing and purchasing experience. It would take into account characteristics of the text itself. Its not an infinite number of things you need to quantify and combine into some sort of quotient or scale, but its more multifarious than we thought it was before, or had the ability to measure before.

One of the dilemmas confronting researchers, ad people, and producers/networks will be whether or not they go with a census (in which case they're bound to lose a lot of the aforementioned nuance) or a sample (in which case you might not get the generalizability you desire). Maybe a flexible system like YouTube, where the stakes are lower, ad money-wise, will evolve new metrics quicker. They’ll weed out the ones that don’t tell you anything new about viewers and their desires and habits, but new tools for gauging that will evolve. Insight is just the beginning of that.