Tag Archives: Dan Gillmor

Fear and Social Media Don’t Mix

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MUD day 19:

A friend of mine who works for a large nonprofit institution serves on a panel that’s trying to decide what the institution should think and do about social media. Should it encourage its employees and other stakeholders to use social media? Should it restrict what they say and do there? Or should it stay strictly hands off, neither aiding nor impeding social media activities?

Journal Register Company's Rules for Social Media

Cynics might argue that institutions inherently distrust anything they can’t control. But their challenge in dealing with social media has more to do with the culture of caution and conservatism that every traditional organization seems to engender. It’s one of the key reasons why the AP repeatedly feels the need to crack down on the way its staff use Twitter, and why Georgia Tech recently decided that federal privacy rules require it to ban classroom wikis.

I suspect most institutions wouldn’t much appreciate John Paton’s three employee rules for using social media. A little too, shall we say, vague. But I do think they would be well served by the slightly more detailed rules Dan Gillmor proposes for news organizations:

  1. Be human.
  2. Be honorable.
  3. Don’t embarrass us.

I can already hear the objections. But my point would be this: If you fear what your employees are going to do on social media, what you really fear is their humanity. Have courage. Fear and social media don’t mix.

Wikipedia Is No Authority–By Design

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MUD day 13:

In an interview in Foreign Policy, published on its website earlier this month, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was asked if he’s shocked to hear that people, including journalists, “use Wikipedia all the time.” His response is worth repeating to any journalist that either uses Wikipedia unthinkingly or unthinkingly refuses to use Wikipedia:

Journalists all use Wikipedia. The bad journalist gets in trouble because they use it incorrectly; the good journalist knows it’s a place to get oriented and to find out what questions to ask.

Wales goes on to say the Wikipedia is actually quite old-fashioned in its approach, looking for “reliable sources” rather than “something in a blog somewhere.”

What I find most interesting about Wikipedia, though, is the way it undercuts the old-fashioned notion of authority. Once you start thinking in any depth about why you should or shouldn’t use Wikipedia as a source, you start to realize how vulnerable to criticism the authority of any source is.

This, I take it, is the position of one of Wikipedia’s biggest fans in journalism, Dan Gillmor. In his book, Mediactive, he argues that the audience for news and other media must change from passive to active consumers, that they have a responsibility to be skeptical and exercise judgment.

Wikipedia, I think, operates on this principle. In telling its users, “don’t trust us; decide for yourself,” it is passing responsibility for judgment back to the individual reader. By handing any user who wants it the key to authorship, Wikipedia is enacting a radical idea: that authority is a shared responsibility.