 In recent years, we became too comfortable letting #Twitter define journalism & media. Algorithms often dictated the narratives we collectively paid attention to. Absurd trends were covered by news outlets & ballooned into major stories while we missed so much real substance. And the quick takes of uninformed politicians & bad actors were forced upon anyone participating in the network. It was bad for democracy. The #Mastodon model makes me hopeful we can do better. #twittermigration 87 comments
@GreenFire @Sheril @GreenFire George Orwell, Ambrose Bierce, Jacob Riis … never went to University. But they had experienced poverty and so could write about it with insight and empathy. What's a journalism degree worth? My BA is in economics. Maybe reporting that touches on the subject (basically everything) wouldn't be so facile, naive or empty if they'd studied it, or some other social science, rather than the triangle intro paragraph. @Voline @Voline @Voline @GreenFire As someone with a journalism degree and awards, I can confirm that even with that piece of paper the more privileged journalists will then say, "Well, we don't think your journalism school is as good as our journalism schools." We're talking about a First Amendment righ (in the U.S.) here. Barriers to entry are just that: Barriers. One of the most successful mainstream journalists I know quit college a semester before graduating. Burn your barriers. Would we have had 60 years of reporters treating the assertions of policemen as gospel if they weren't candy asses who went from suburban high school to college to newsroom? I doubt it. @Voline I would have more faith in the ability of J-school graduates to evaluate evidence if thousands of them hadn’t tried to sell the public absolutely transparent lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and relations with Al Queda. Not all. The McClatchy newspapers were conspicuous in the skepticism and quality of their coverage of the drive to war. The fact that they were able to present so much evidence contrary to the Bushites assertions, evidence that was excluded from the majority of respectable news outlets, gives the lie to the excuse that the poor reporters were taken in by the security state. They were either fools, incompetents, or opportunists none of which speaks well of the value of J-school training. @GreenFire @K8TDidToo I mean it wouldn't engender my confidence if the same instance hosts Dan Rather along with Alex Jones for instance but it trickles down to the intern level too. idk @GreenFire @Sheril There’s suggestions out there that media platforms could start their own instances and have all their journos on that instance as a way of verifying identity. I like that myself.  @GreenFire @Sheril Spoken like someone who has never worked in the business. Some of the best journalists I've ever worked with -- and a whole lot who have risen high in the ranks -- never went to j-school. Some of my esteemed former colleagues were liberal-arts majors, as well as a math major, a botany major, a pharmacist, and a guy who worked for years on a fishing boat in Alaska and never went to college. @Sheril There's something intensely gratifying in your (aspirational) use of the past tense here. @Sheril it’s not just Twitter either! We let technology define journalism in all sorts of ways we probably shouldn’t. There’s a great (unfortunately paywalled) essay about this by Barbie Zelizer which I link to from this paper where I also start to unpack some of the thinks we’re leaving on the table from a technology perspective. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/what-should-modern-reporters-notebook-include-21st-century  @Sheril I am not an expert in any relevant discipline, so please take this for what it’s (not) worth: I am very skeptical of any procedural or technological solution to what are problems of human behavior. At least the ability to moderate membership of smaller groups may make individual instances a bit better than the birdspace. @Sheril it’s so freshing to be read a substantive, ad and troll free feed. It’s a bit like reading an actual newspaper or good book by a Sunday morning fire after enjoying freshly brewed coffee and homemade pancakes. Or like discovering the sound of birds in quiet village after years of horns and screaming in the city. @Sheril what do you think of the instances being set up specifically for journalists? E.g. https://mstdn.media/@guardian/109300971888865265 @debrastorr Not a bad idea, although journos are currently spread across many networks. We’ll have to wait & see how everything shakes out over time. @Sheril @debrastorr Was the design distributed for a reason? Seems like putting all the eggs in one basket would make it easier for bad actors to block (or disrupt) an entire treasure chest of delightful #OpenDiscussion. It would make it easier to find clear, relevant voices however. Thank you both for being here. @DGE1435 @Sheril That’s why I thought Sheril might have an interesting take on it. We are seeing some important media and journalists dipping their ties in. For me, if I see the likes of @jburnmurdoch here, I think it’s a good thing and I see he’s taken pains to demonstrate it’s really him. @Sheril @renissance1 This exactly. Excited to discover how we can do it differently. This feels like a moment of potential finally being realised. 👏🏾 @Sheril @Sheril agree… mostly. Mastodon has a good technical-human architecture to allow for a better information. But it is also a human system and it is subject to all human “vices”. This means: corruption, manipulation, lies, marketing, ecc. Am optimistic about mastodon. Not so much about humanity. @Sheril agree, though it’s not just Twitter tbf, but that was certainly the saddest instance of this algorithm tyranny. Seeing your feed entirely dictated by the outcomes of your last click, and watching extremists get rewarded for dog-whistling, was depressing. So many of our political problems today are driven by the fact that moderate, sensible views simply aren’t interesting to AI. Don’t understand yet how this place works, but a de-centralised model is refreshing! 🙂 @beebrookshire I think it will take some time before we settle in here & the network & instances will be adjusted. But I’m optimistic. @Sheril But I do agree, I think Twitter has been powerful because...the media was there, we were all there paying attention to it and reporting breathlessly. So many people never even used it at all! @Sheril Well stated. This is the social media "colon cleanse" that has been needed for a while. #twitter #mastodon #twittermigration @Sheril Came to see a great proportion of stories, each presented as news but that just seemed to be a tweet with a frame around it. Economically efficient, I expect, but didn't seem like journalism. Echo your remark that it was bad for democracy, corrosive to the republic.  @Sheril I hope so. But, after 28 years on the Internet, and having heard all of grandiose proclamations from emerging platforms in years past, I am pretty cynical about the prospects of democratic engagement on social media. @Sheril If any journalists want to talk about the fediverse, I've been studying it for a long time now. I also have recommendations on how journalists might engage with it in ethical ways. @Sheril Mastodon has reminded me just how much genuine #substance and intellect there is in the world. Having my #echochamber broken and not portable has been a liberating moment.  @Sheril I’ve often thought how dissonant it is that most things written about “the algorithm” involve how to beat it. And no one stopped to think, maybe this means it’s bad and doesn’t actually serve users.  @Sheril it was comfortable for the privileged. Increasingly uncomfortable for the targeted groups. @Sheril we began our downward slide when mainstream media channels started reporting Facebook and Twitter as news sources. "So and so tweeted today....[insert public policy announcement here]" "So and so posted on Facebook this morning that world leaders are [such and such and such]." I'm all for new communication channels and spreading the word, but it seemed like nothing was being vetted or put into perspective, just a bunch of tweets getting posted on the TV. @Sheril I was thinking about this as I finished filling out my ballot (had close to 60 different races and measures to vote on). I was looking at who all endorsed each candidate and I found I gave no weight to who the 2 biggest papers in our state endorsed- because they were part of the problem and both had gone off the rails on facts/research vs clickbait and creating false narratives. I hope we can find a way back to our press being the fourth estate it is supposed to be. @Sheril I hope to see journalists universally adopt the use of #ContentWarning tags to give people a way to opt out. CW tags increase reach, and they make fetchy headlines. Win-win for all. @Sheril I believe it's not just Twitter, people generally because dependant on social media as their sources of info and those nasty algos just let marketers wreak havoc on our societies with obvious lies unpunished etc. A dad world to fix. @Sheril I'm hopeful for your optimism, but the pessimist in me suspects the hole is dug too deep already and the hold of the ignorant/misleading is too strong. @Sheril Very true! Some of it probably involves better designs and incentives for the people creating and maintaining Mastodon. And they have a huge task ahead! But it’s also up to us, users, to be conscious of not chasing the dopamine rush all the time. Perhaps we will be better off when we learn to live with slower social media. I like the spirit, but... if most journalists and most politicians ended up here, what would stop a repeat of the same story? The social network most suited to those who have short messages to announce to the world will attract the two above-mentioned categories, and when they are all there, they'll get in fights with each other... @Sheril New to Mastodon here, but it feels like there are lots of ways it could be corrupted and abused. I'm wondering.. what are the features that separate it from Twitter and, in particular, make you hopeful?  @Sheril agreed so much. I think we can start by keeping AI out of the timeline. We’ve seen what it does. @Sheril this had to be said and, yes, breaking that mindset control up will allow more individual thought. It’s ironic isn’t it…an early tool of free thought becomes the prison. It’s current owner the warden. #musktwitter #freespeechmatters @Sheril I think social media led to a race to break the news, which in turn led to a drop in checking and quality control. It became necessary to publish first and apologise later for error, mistake and omission because being first with the news was all that mattered due to shares, likes and replies driving first posts into everyone's newsfeed. @Sheril Agree except "algorithms" cannot "dictate". Algorithms do not have agency, they are tools through which advertisers influenced the narratives. Absurd attention-seeking reporting is as old as the advertisement funded business model. To that end, I do not believe #Mastodon represents a competitive alternative business model yet. @Sheril I will say, as a former journalist, there did come a point when I asked myself, “When did writing an article filled mostly with tweets become news?” Because I see an awful lot of articles that are just the Twitterverse’s reaction to something. @Sheril Read Walter Lippmann. He was oddly prescient about what could happen 100 years ago. Of course he was talking about newspapers but the point was the same. We don't like to pay for our news but advertisers pay. That leads to We are not the customer we are the product on twitter. This leads immediately to #propaganda since Those who own the media control the propaganda. We furiously agree. If we are willing to pay for it, we can get a better democracy. @Sheril Trending on Twitter has meant that screaming into the void is voting in the culture every day. People in political and entertainment circles pay attention to those things. When I post elsewhere, a tiny fraction of my followers will see it. But there was a chance of my voice reaching farther on Twitter. @Sheril This is so true. I was hating Twitter and wondering why I was seeing so many posts from people I did not even follow, the algorithm was getting worse and worse. @Sheril God, yes! The trending hashtags in a cesspool of gossip and false narratives are exhausting. @Sheril and the latest example is Musk saying on Twitter to vote GOP and it getting amplified to every Washington Post reader. Did we not learn anything from the Trump years? @Sheril Some years ago I watched a documentary about how the goverment of West Germany went to the Soviet Union to negotiate about the last german WWII soldiers in soviet captivity. There was a story about one frustrated german politician who ran out of the room and said "The negotiations are canceled!". That wasn't published in the news back then because he went back very quickly, but I don't want to think about how this would play out in today's world. @Sheril Democracy is not something provided by big corporations. It resembels more a comunity open source project. @Sheril truth has been spoken! Been trying to figure out how to best engage with news content here. Learning to use CW feature more. |
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I hope to see an instance formed that will only accept account holders that have degrees from accredited schools of journalism or something along those lines.