Citizen Media & the Iranian Protests: Exhibit A

Written by Mary Joyce on June 22, 2009 – 6:09 pm -

One the big stories with regard to digital activism in Iran has been the use of citizen media to disseminate information about the protests (see references here, here, and here).  The picture above, from the front page of today’s New York Times is putatively an image of the daughter of reformist cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, but could just as easily be an illustration of the new media environment: no less than eight cell phones and digital cameras (red circles) are recording the event the New York Times reporter was photographing.  (For a large version of the photo, click here.) It’s old print media and new digital citizen media juxtaposed in a single image.

image source: New York Times


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Posted in Campaigns, Digital Images, Mobile Phones | 3 Comments »

Iranian Elections, Information Sharing and Twitter

Written by Kate Brodock on June 19, 2009 – 2:46 pm -

Earlier this week, amidst travel and trying really hard to work, I followed the events of what was happening in Iran post-election.  I followed it all on Twitter.

There are many comments I could make on the events, but I wanted to highlight something that will be important for how information and participation happens in the months and years to come.

The fact is, we are all becoming a larger part of the information dissemination mechanisms that were once reserved for formal media channels.  DigiActive has reported many instances of citizen journalism, on-the-ground reporting and information gathering, but now we’re talking about the addition of a process of broader dissemination.

We’re “regular” people, we have the information coming to us, and it’s our choice to pass it on or not.  The reason I  read hardly a single newspaper article on the topic all day was because I was getting my information handed to me by people from Boston, Europe, Iran… everywhere.  Regular people.  I got all the relevant links I needed from those 140-character posts.

The fact is, we are all now part of the information dissemination mechanism now.  When I reported on the Moldovan protests in April, I noted that part of the process that we were seeing was not necessarily just that the protesters were using social media tools to get their message out, but that the resulting international furvor that erupted was fueled by other people who were not on the ground.  Not even in the country.

This time around, we saw this same process magnified immensely.  A message from Mousavi highlights how important this process was not only in what was said – One Person = One Broadcaster – but also in the the resulting relay-like speed that the message reached the world.

mousavi

iran_twitter-stream

Mousavi recognized the the power of this information stream.  Clay Shirky alluded to it in his Q&A with TED on the topic, and colleague Gaurav Mishra highlighted it in his analysis of the events as well.

No one was told to do anything with the information coming out of Iran, or had any explicit instructions to do so.  The messages could have remained dead in the water.  But we were all engaged by what was happening, we were interacting with other people through discussion, and we genuinely wanted to participate by adding to the conversation, spreading the information and learning more about the situation.

The fact that people had real-time, important information in their hands that they could “touch and feel,” and their ability to actively join in the conversation and the spread of vital information made momentary journalists out of us all.  And it will continue to do so more and more in the future.


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Posted in Events | 3 Comments »

Chinese campaign reports quake victims

Written by Mary Joyce on May 21, 2009 – 9:27 pm -

Background: On May 12, 2008, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale shook China’s Sichuan province, killing at least 68,000 people. Among the stories of grief and outrage that emerged afterwards was the large number of schools destroyed by the earthquake and the children that died within them. Unlike surrounding buildings, many of which survived, the schools were particularly vulnerable because of shoddy workmanship. These “tofu-dregs schoolhouses,” a result of corruption that siphoned off construction money, meant that the buildings which should have been the more earthquake resistant were in fact the least. Despite outrage, there was little official response from the Chinese government.

Shortly after the quake, prominent Chinese artist and blogger Ai Weiwei visited the quake site and blogged about what he saw, particularly parents who had lost their child. As a result of these posts, readers of his blog volunteered to help him create a list of all the children who had died.

Tools: blogs, citizen journalists crowd-sourcing data collection offline

Crowd-sourcing + self-publishing : On December 15, 2008 Ai formally announced a campaign to collect the names of all children who had died in the quake before the one-year anniversary on in May 2009. Volunteers went out to the towns and villages affected and interviewed school officials and the parents of children who were killed. On his blog, Ai recorded both the results of the investigation and the stories of how it was carried out. In one poignant anecdote, a volunteer is stone-walled when seeking the names of deceased students from an elementary school principal. “We just are trying to find the truth!,” says the volunteer, frustrated. “The government has already announced the truth,” replies the principal. (This anecdote was translated by China Digital Times, an excellent resource for information about this campaign.)

Censored: In April and May, as the quake anniversary approached, the administrator of Ai’s blog began deleting his posts on the project. Two actions were taken to combat this censorship. First, the list was moved to a server outside of China. Also, according to Professor Xiao Qiang, other bloggers began to mirror the censored data on their own sites, in order to discourage the take-downs.

Result: The campaign succeeded in collecting and publishing the names of 7,605 students who had been killed. In addition, the Chinese government finally released its own list of 5,205 names shortly before the anniversary deadline, probably a result of pressure from Ai’s grassroots movement.

Implications: The most critical element of this campaign is the synergy between online and offline efforts. For every blog post or new name added to the list, there was the work of a volunteer (many of whom were detained) heading out into the towns of Sichuan with a camera and notepad. Without Ai’s blog, which acted as an alternative information channel, the names of the students could not have been published. But the digital element was only part of the campaign – the final step, in fact. Social media can simplify many of the tasks of activism (in the time it takes to call one person you can email thousands), but campaigns in which activists use the internet as an excuse to sit back in their armchairs are unlikely to succeed.

image source: wikimedia


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Posted in Asia, Blogs, Campaigns | No Comments »

Digital Activism & the 4Cs Social Media Framework

Written by Gaurav Mishra on May 10, 2009 – 5:37 pm -

The 4Cs Social Media Framework

The Need for the 4Cs Social Media Framework

Over the last year, I have had to explain how social media works to diplomats, defense officials, and academics and students focused on fields as diverse as international affairs, management and sociology.

I have found that first-timer find social media confusing because of two reasons.

The first reason is the excessive focus on specific social media tools. Many first-timers are introduced to social media via specific tools. Many ’social media experts’ who are practitioners rather than thinkers also focus on specific tools. Since social media encompasses many different types of tools, and each tool has specific characteristics and a steep learning curve, a toolkit approach can quickly become overwhelming. Blogging (Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter), video-sharing (YouTube), photo-sharing (Flickr), podcasting (Blog Talk Radio), mapping (Google Maps), social networking (Facebook), social voting (Digg), social bookmarking (Delicious), lifestreaming (Friendfeed), wikis (Wikipedia), and virtual worlds (Second Life) are all quite different from each other and new and hybrid tools are being introduced almost everyday. Mastering each tool individually seems like a lot of work and a lot of people give up even before they begin.

The second reason is a clear definition of what social media is, even within the social media community. Different thinkers and practitioners use different terms to describe similar tools and practices. Terms like social media, digital media, new media, citizen media, participatory media, peer-to-peer media, social web, participatory web, peer-to-peer web, read write web, social computing, social software, web 2.0, and even crowdsourcing and wikinomics can mean similar or slightly different things depending upon who is using it. Journalists, marketers, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, software vendors and academics approach the space from their own perspectives and have their own preferred terms. Used precisely, these terms can mean very different things. However, very few people use these terms precisely and almost nobody agrees on the exact definition of these terms.

The 4Cs Social Media Framework

My own approach to social media is both tool-agnostic and terminology-agnostic. So, I use the term social media to encompass all the tools and all the practices that are described by the terms I mentioned above.

Instead of getting distracted by the tools and the terminologies, I focus on the four underlying themes in social media, the 4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence. Taken together, these four themes constitute the value system of social media. I believe that the tools are transient, the buzzwords will change, but the value system embedded in these 4Cs is here to stay. So, let’s look at these 4Cs in some detail.

The First C: Content

The first C, Content, refers to the idea that social media tools allow everyone to become a creator, by making the publishing and distribution of multimedia content both free and easy, even for amateurs.

User generated content, and the hope of monetizing it through advertising, is at the core of the business model of almost all social media platforms. User generated content is also at the core of citizen journalism, the notion that amateur users can perform journalist-like functions (accidentally or otherwise) by reporting and commenting on news. Citizen journalists have repeatedly emerged as critical in crisis reporting and several citizen journalist platforms have emerged to harness their potential to report hyper-local news.

However, just because everyone can become a creator doesn’t mean that everyone does. Most users prefer to consume user generated content, by reading blog, watching videos, or browsing through photos. Some user curate user generated content, by tagging it on social bookmarking websites, voting for it on social voting websites, commenting on it, or linking to it. Researcher have found support for the 1:9:90 rule in many different contexts. The 1:9:90 rule says that 90% of all users are consumers, 9% of all users are curators and only 1% of the users are creators.

The Second C: Collaboration

The second C, Collaboration, refers to the idea that social media facilitates the aggregation of small individual actions into meaningful collective results.

Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action.

As consumers and curators engage with compelling content, the content becomes the center of conversations. Conversations create buzz, which is how ideas tip, become viral. Many social media practitioners who are from a marketing or public relations background are focused on creating conversations.

However, some of us recognize that conversations are a mere stepping stone for co-creation. In co-creation, the value lies as much in the curated aggregate as in the individual contributions. Wikis are a perfect example of co-creation. Open group blogs, photo pools, video collages and similar projects are also good examples of co-creation.

Collective action goes one step further and uses online engagement to initiate meaningful action. Collective action can take the form of signing online petitions, fundraising, tele-calling, or organizing an offline protest or event.

Even though conversations, co-creation and collective action are different forms of collaboration, the difficulty in collaborating increases dramatically as we move from conversations to co-creation to collective action. The key is to start with a big task, break it down into individual actions (modularity) that are really small (granularity), and then put them together into a whole without losing value (aggregating mechanism). It is also important to bridge online conversations into mainstream media buzz and online engagement into offline action.

The Third C: Community

The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The notion of a community is really tricky because every web page is a latent community, waiting to be activated. A vibrant community has size and strength, and is built around a meaningful social object.

Most people understand that a community that has a large number of members (size) who have strong relationships and frequent interactions with each other (strength) is better than a community which doesn’t. However, a community is more than the sum total of its members and their relationships.

People don’t build relationships with each other in a vacuum. A vibrant community is built around a social object that is meaningful for its members. The social object can be a person, a place, a thing or an idea. The Netroots community is built around progressive politics in America. The My Barack Obama community was built around Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The Obama Girl community was built around a series of videos Amber Lee Ettinger made to support Obama’s campaign. Sometimes, choosing the right social object can be crucial for building a vibrant community. HP can choose to build a community around printers, printing, or corporate careers, all of which will have very different characteristics.

The Fourth C: Collective Intelligence

The fourth C, Collective Intelligence, refers to the idea that the social web enables us to not only aggregate individual actions, but also run sophisticated algorithms on them and extract meaning from them.

Collective intelligence can be based on both implicit and explicit actions and often takes the form of reputation and recommendation systems. Google extracts the pagerank, a measure of how important a page is, from our (implicit) linking and clicking behavior. Amazon and Netflix are able to offer us recommendations based on our (implicit) browsing, (implicit) buying and (explicit) rating behavior and comparing it to the behavior of other people like us. eBay and Amazon assign ratings to sellers and reviewers respectively, based on whether other members in the community had a good experience with them. On the day of the 2008 US elections, the Obama campaign was able to assign trimmed down telecalling lists to volunteers by ticking off the names of the people who had already voted.

The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow. If the collective intelligence is then shared back with the community, the members find more value in the community, and the community grows even more, leading to a virtuous cycle.

The4Cs Social Media Framework in Summary

So, the 4Cs form a hierarchy of what is possible with social media. As we move from Content to Collaboration to Community to Collective Intelligence, it becomes increasingly difficult to both observe these layers and activate them. Also each layer is often, but not always, a pre-requisite for the next layer. Compelling content is a pre-requisite for meaningful collaboration, which is a pre-requisite for a vibrant community, which, in turn, is a pre-requisite for collective intelligence.

Although I designed the 4Cs framework to explain how I see social media, I have also found it to be a useful tools to evaluate specific social media initiatives. The best social media initiatives leverage all these four layers, but I have seen that most initiatives get stuck between the Collaboration and Community layers. Examples of social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers are few and far between. It’s important to note, however, that each layer is valuable in itself, and it’s OK to design an initiative to only exploit the Content or Collaboration layers.

The 4Cs Social Media Framework Applied to Digital Activism

Let me explain what I just said my applying the 4Cs framework to digital activism initiatives.

Many digital activism initiatives like Social Documentary and Witness primarily focus on using social media tools to create and share compelling multimedia Content. Some of this Content generates Conversations and becomes viral and some of it might even lead to Collective Action. However, the focus is on Content.

Other initiatives, like Vote Report India or the Pink Chaddi Campaign, start off with a strong focus on Collaboration around a specific event. In its first iteration, Vote Report India leveraged Co-creation by creating a platform for collectively tracking irregularities in the 2009 Indian elections. The Pink Chaddi Campaign leveraged Collective Action by asking its supporters to send pink panties to the Sri Ram Sena as Valentine’s Day gifts. As these campaigns become successful, they try to move to the next Community level, but don’t always succeed in building a long-term community.

Very few digital activism initiatives are able to leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers. The Netroots community in the US, especially Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo and MoveOn.org, have been able to build a strong Community around progressive politics in the US. My Barack Obama leverage some aspects of Collective Intelligence during the 2008 presidential campaign.

What About You?

If you are a social media practitioner or a digital activist focused on the Content and Collaboration layers, I would urge you to think about how you can move to the Community layer. If you already run a vibrant community, I would urge you to think about introducing reputation and recommendation systems in it and leverage the Collective Intelligence layer.

If you are designing a new social media initiative, I would urge you to use the 4Cs Framework in the design and strategy phase itself. Perhaps, in phase one, you would want to start with a campaign built around Content and focused on Collaboration, with elements of co-creation and/ or collective action. You would do well to plan for a phase two which is focused on Community, with a dash of Collective Intelligence built in. The question you want to ask yourself, then, is: how can I design a Collaboration based campaign so that it can be used to build a long-term Community?

If you are a journalist, analyst or academic in the business of understanding social media initiatives, you’ll find the 4Cs Framework really useful. What are the boundary conditions needed to succeed at each layer? What are the boundary conditions needed to move from Content to Collaboration, from Collaboration to Community, and from Community to Collective Intelligence? Can you think of other digital activism or social media initiatives that leverage the Community or Collective Intelligence layers?

Do share your thoughts.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.


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Posted in Theory | 4 Comments »

Tactic: Twitter is the new journalism

Written by Talia Whyte on February 12, 2009 – 12:37 am -

cctvDescription: With the growing popularity of new media tools like Twitter, many in traditional news media around the world wonder if they should call it a day. Now more than ever, citizen journalism has broken down the barriers to help get out stories in the name of social justice and transparency, especially during natural disasters.

Digital Tools Being Used: Twitter

What Did They Do: Just a few days ago, people in China used Twitter to report news and information about a fire at the CCTV complex in Beijing, China. Earlier today a 7.2 magnitude earthquake shocked Indonesia, with no damages or casualties so far.

“I continue to be impressed how twitter is able to report on the Earthquake in Indonesia a few hours before it’s reported on major news sites,” from a tweet by Jyamasaki


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Posted in Asia, Tactics | 1 Comment »

Campaign: Digital Tools and the Greek Riots

Written by Mary Joyce on December 22, 2008 – 5:32 pm -

Digital tools have been used to organize violent protests, but could also be used for peaceful change.

Description: Since an Athenian teenager was accidentally killed by a policeman’s bullet on December 6th, Greece has been gripped by riots. While DigiActive does not condone the violent nature of the actions taken, we do acknowledge the value of discussing the digital activism techniques used, as they may be of value to nonviolent campaigns for change.

Digital Activism Tools: citizen journalism web site (Indymedia Athens: http://athens.indymedia.org), Facebook, SMS

How These Tools Are Being Used: The Athens page of the international citizen journalism site Indymedia.org has been a prime location for mobilizing support for the protests. The site also gives other useful information, such as what a protester should do if they are arrested. In addition to publishing its own information, the site has also re-broadcasts SMS messages, which protesters are using to organize actions such as the occupation of university buildings. By re-broadcasting SMS messages on the internet, they are given a wider audience than simply the social network of the sender and thus larger actions can be organized.

Facebook is also playing a role in the protests. Several groups have been set up for the teenage who was killed, Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Together, they have approximately 187,000 members. The largest group, ALEXANDROS GRIGOROPOULOS (R.I.P.), which boasts 136,500 members, includes messages about upcoming protests as well as remembrances of Alexandros.

Outcome: There have been 176 arrests and $1.3 billion in property damage yet there is little indication that protests have resulted in any positive outcomes addressing protesters’ underlying concerns with poverty, corruption, and a weak education system.

Sources: Reuters Blog, New York Times, and AllVoices.com (photo)


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Posted in Campaigns, Europe, Mobile Phones, Social Networks | 2 Comments »