When someone
says that something has happened you can look at it in many different ways when
trying to determine the value of the statement.
They could
be lying, they could have misunderstood what happened or they may be right, but
it’s hard to work out based on the statement by itself. You need to judge
contextual elements like how well you know the person, what benefits do they
gain by lying as opposed to telling the truth, etc. Hundreds of things, and the
bigger the thing that happened the more reason you’ll have to doubt them.
Of course society
has told us that there is one group of individuals who can generally be trusted
– the journalists. We assume that given
they have the pride of the organisation they work for at stake as well as their
own journalistic integrity that they will be honest in their retelling of
events. . There are numerous examples in which this is wrong but for the most
part its an accepted part of the world, that if an event is reported by a major
newspaper then it happened.
Sure that’s
great for reporters, but what if the person telling you about an event isn’t a
person? Sure, we can check a news site to see if the event occurred, but that
still leaves us being unable to trust the average person and leaving the news
publishers as the default fountain of truth.
It’s a bit
of a tricky matter, but what about if it wasn’t just one person tell you that
something happened, but say a hundred, or a thousand? Sure as indicated before each
person may have a reason to be lying to you but the odds of having so many
people together who either want to misdirect you or didn’t see the event in the
right way drops with each additional person that says the event happened. This is
because the larger number of witnesses changes the perspective of the event from
requiring a qualitative analysis to a quantitative analysis.
This creates
a system of truth by numbers, truth by majority or any other way you want to
phrase it and is the key supporting feature of citizen journalism, creating
believable news by nothing more than having sheer numbers.
This
quantitative news reporting actually has a few key advantages over regular
journalism. Regular journalism is
ideally driven by its effort to maintain the integrity in its reporting,
forcing them to analyse the quality of the reports and sources before they are
published in papers which can cause delays. Also given that they are limited in
the number of reporters that exist they may not be able to cover the event
immediately. Citizen journalism can instead focus on relaying events as they
occur providing a more rapid dissemination of information. Any incorrect
information should ideally be drowned out by accurate reports.
The second
element is that newspapers are often limited in the information they can include
based on space in the article, not having a source on the event or just not
even having a reporter in the area. Citizen journalism on the other hand is
more inclusive – as long as someone saw it happen it can be reported and added
to the hulking mass of information.
Of course
having truth by numbers isn’t without its own problems. Although I mentioned
that the odds of a large number of people getting something wrong is unlikely,
it isn’t impossible. Nor is it impossible for the information to be
misunderstood, or misrepresented such as the scope of the incident (ie a large
community in a small area could generate enough noise to make people believe it
was over the expanse of a much larger area). Further still only the really big news of
hostages, wars or other similar major events gets enough people posting about
it for it to become big enough to make an impact on twitter trends.
But still,
citizen journalism is a thing that exists and continues to evolve. We have the
information available to us, but we are currently lacking in the tools to get
the important details in a form we can easily digest. Given another ten years
however and it could very well develop into the major source of news for most
people, surpassing that of regular journalism.
