Second in a series of reaction posts that I’m doing for JOUR 325 New Media & Social Change. My students are blogging reflection papers for each of our books, and I’m going to do one with them. These are my opening statements before class.

So we’ve worked though two books in two weeks here. Hopefully at some point you asked yourself why we’re reading a book like We The Media that feels so repetitive to Cluetrain. Hopefully you dug deeper and found the answer as well.

We read Cluetrain because it was a first-of-its-kind salvo against old institutions. We’re coming for you and taking no prisoners, yadda yadda yadda. But Cluetrain was a book about how was going to change things; Gillmor is writing with a different perspective. He’s talking about how things have changed, and he comes armed to the teeth with examples.

But it’s more than that. Whereas Cluetrain was taking a macro-level approach in terms of society, Gillmor is drilling down to the personal level. Sure, there are big ideas there, but this is a book about personal approaches. This is from the user side. This time, it’s personal (movie cliches aside).

By the time We The Media comes around, we’re talking about a new approach. Institutions we used to venerate are being torn down and the citizens are rising up. Gillmor is talking about a new layer to the the Cluetrain world, and that’s the rise of the mobile Web that is in and on every device imagineable. It’s Cluetrain on crack. Whereas the Web to the four musketeers lived on computers and laptops, Gillmor is talking phones and iPods, the very building blocks of a ubiquitous Web.

Mobile, it seems, changes us. It gave rise to “open source” journalists, aka citizen journalists, who could capture and record information for dissemination to anyone, anywhere, at any time. When the source of information no longer has to be the traditional media company, the vetted word, the actual professional journalist, then something interesting happens: We become consumer-creators, capable of changing the world even if we’re not behind a computer.

Don’t believe me? Take, for example, Neda. She changed the world by appearing in a citizen journalist’s video after being killed during protests following the Iran elections.

Neda Soltani Martyred
Uploaded by opinionbug. – News videos hot off the press.

But there’s more to the story here that is embedded in this discussion, and it’s one I ask a lot. Sure, every citizen is a reporter. But do they want to be? That journalist-newsmaker-former audience cabal sounds like a simple way of describing the new reality, but what does it get us?

More to the point, if Facebook is the golden child heir to blogging, do users see themselves as the types of citizen media producers Gillmor describes? Perhaps, and perhaps not. One thing we’ll be looking at is that sometimes it doesn’t matter how they describe themselves so much as what we’re doing. Recent research, for example, says that people share about 12 pieces of content per week on Facebook on average. That’s a staggering number. Maybe we aren’t producing, but we sure are trying to be guides and curators to this brave new media world.

In the end, think back to the world we have, not the world we hope. Neda’s video spread virally because of two things: YouTube and Twitter. Users had access to those tools and perhaps never used them in that way before, but given the right mix of things – a shocking event, a network of interest, common passion, and (YES) tools to spread the word – suddenly a passive consumer becomes an active creator.

The point, in other words, isn’t that people are doing this all the time. They aren’t, and in fact the world would be on information overload if they were.

The point is that we can when we want to. Stop and digest that for a second. It might not be in your face, but that’s a revolution. It’s the kind of hindsight that guides you through this book, lets you snort at the dreamy reference to the fact that “someday” we’ll have fast streaming video on the Web (YouTube went mainstream about 6 months after WTM came out) and other such oddities. Vision over visibility, as the saying goes.

But this is a point I want to spin forward for class on Thursday. What is required of us? And I don’t mean the odd collection of souls that we’re cramming into 215 Coppee. I mean, for this to work, what do we need to be? As a society. As people. And I’m not asking just as creators of media messages, even spontaneous ones, but also as consumers. How do we navigate this new media landscape and engage people in this new reality. How do we find and connect with ideas?

And finally, how do we protect it? When I teach COMM 100 I don’t do much with the section on legal problems, but they are worth talking about in this context. We touched on net neutrality, but there are a larger host of issues connected with media companies trying to keep what they’ve got.

The people are at the gates. Will they try to shut us out?

First in a series of reaction posts that I’m doing for JOUR 325 New Media & Social Change. My students are blogging reflection papers for each of our books, and I’m going to do one with them. These are my opening statements before class.

People of Earth ….

It’s hard to beat that for an opening line in a book. Just sounds freaking grandiose, like what is going to follow is mangificent. In the case of , now out with a 10th anniversary edition, there is a payoff that’s completely worth it.

I worry my students won’t fully grasp the wonder of this book. It set my mind on fire when I first read it in the early part of the oh-ohs, while I was slogging away at a newspaper that was built on principles of closed-ness and paranoia. Their original Web site (Cluetrain.com, still rocking the late-90s Web look) stands as a monument to awesome, but I wonder if younger folks see it as a relic.

It’s not. Even without the 10th anniversary adds, in which the authors debate the merits of their own work, the work stands on its own. In fact, the extra work in some ways ruins the experience because it replaces our ability to absorb and critique with one that’s ready-made. It was necessary for the authors to reflect, of course, but it’s a shame.

If you think Cluetrain has nothing original to add, you’re missing the point. The authors were saying this when nobody else was. What you might see now as normal views of the Web was a revolution in 1999. The culture of the Web that shines through in this book – the libertarian spirit, the desire to create, the desire to have voice, the desire for authenticity – was part of the culture of the Web long before Cluetrain hit the presses. The authors set about synthesizing all they had seen and experienced in the character and subculture of the Web and went to work describing something forward-thinking – where this is taking us.

To analyze the book example-by-example is a master class in the havoc the Web hath wrought on organizations and corporations that were just fine with the way things were, thank you very much. Read more

A new section for my syllabi, starting with JOUR 325 New Media & Social Change this spring:

How to rock this class

I don’t care if you get an A in this class. Really. It’s not my job to make sure you hit your marks, but in the long run your grades mean nothing compared to what you take away from your education. But for what it’s worth, I find that my best students have more than an A in mind when they approach their course work. The A comes as a side effect to an intellectually curious mind and a good work ethic geared toward learning, not mere grade achievement. So take the following to heart:

This class is all about ideas. That means you have to put in the effort to make it work. I realize many of you are graduating, but this class is structured in a way that discourages you from coasting toward the finish line. Life isn’t like that, and the ideas you bring to bear are sometimes all you have when things get tough. Trust me on this. I was a professional journalist, after all. So on that note, a few words of wisdom:

1. Do the reading not because you have to but because you need to. Scribble notes in the margins. Think about it. Wrestle with it. Argue with your friends about it. Not every idea is obvious or easy, and connecting the different thought lines in this class sure won’t be easy. Don’t settle for less when ideas challenge you.
2. Don’t think of the reflection papers in this class as an assignment. They are a blank canvas for you. Have fun with them. Be funny. Be irreverent. But come with some original thoughts that don’t use citations as a crutch to demonstrate that you can think a little. Interact with the material, but give me way, way more than a book report.
3. The study of social change in the context of media is by definition interdisciplinary. Make use of ideas you’ve learned in other courses in discussions and in your papers, particularly ideas from non-journalism and non-communication courses. This class is intended to combine of all kinds of different work you’ve done at Lehigh, and by now you better have some ideas to bring to the table.
4. Come prepared. Read your classmates’ papers and pick two that make you think, or furrow your brow, or ask new questions unrelated to the paper itself because the approach is so fresh.. Apply #1 above to this gold mine of thoughts being generated by our own little crowd. If you bring only papers that you think are awesome, I will be sorely disappointed. This is not a lovefest — it’s an ideafest.
5. Be prepared to be wrong. Or gloriously right. Throw your ideas, even the offbeat ones, into the crucible and let’s kick them around every week. You don’t have all the answers, I can guarantee that.