{"id":11755,"date":"2016-06-23T04:25:00","date_gmt":"2016-06-23T09:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=11755"},"modified":"2024-12-06T09:44:15","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T14:44:15","slug":"love-them-or-hate-them-twitter-and-facebook-have-democratized-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2016\/06\/23\/love-them-or-hate-them-twitter-and-facebook-have-democratized-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Love them or hate them, Twitter and Facebook have democratized media"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s easy to get frustrated with social media sometimes\u2014the endless inane Twitter fights, the shallow selfies and food porn on Instagram, videos of exploding watermelons and other ephemera on Facebook. But every now and then, something happens that reminds us of how powerful these platforms can truly be, especially when traditional media either isn\u2019t available or fails to do its job properly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sit-in on Wednesday<\/a> in the House of Representatives is just one recent example. In case you missed the whole thing, a group of Democratic members led by Rep. John Lewis of Georgia decided to protest the lack of a vote on proposed gun-control legislation. In the Senate, the group would have been able to filibuster to show their displeasure, but that isn\u2019t allowed in the House\u2014so they staged a sit-in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the not-so-distant past, that would have been the end of it. Without cameras broadcasting the event, reports may have filtered out gradually via other means, but there would have been no real-time visual evidence. But now, everyone with a smartphone is effectively their own media company, a reporter and broadcaster all in one, thanks to Twitter and Facebook and their live-streaming tools. In other words, media has been almost completely democratized, for better or worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was\u00a0originally published\u00a0at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

\n

A big lesson of last night’s (Periscoped) congressional sit-in was how important robust, decentralized Internet platforms are for democracy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So first one and then another Democratic House members got out their cellphones and started streaming live video<\/a> using Periscope, Twitter\u2019s live-streaming app. Others started using Facebook Live, the social network\u2019s relatively new streaming feature. Then C-SPAN and a number of other news broadcasters picked up some of the Periscope and Facebook streams and re-broadcast them. Soon, thousands were watching<\/a> live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, there have been other, far more compelling examples of democratized media and what it is capable of than a bunch of congressmen and women sitting on the floor of the House ordering pizza. Live video and updates from Egypt\u2019s Tahrir Square or demonstrations in Turkey definitely qualify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are some fairly obvious downsides to this phenomenon as well\u2014and more examples of that every day\u2014whether it\u2019s Twitter harassment or Facebook Live streaming a rape, or the shooting death of a Chicago man<\/a> in real-time. Ultimately, these tools serve to amplify human behavior, regardless of whether it\u2019s good or bad behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Next time folks argue for making it easier for copyright holders and governments to take down live streaming video, think of this moment<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s also easy to get caught up in how democratic these kinds of events are\u2014an example of what former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo called \u201cthe global village square\u201d\u2014and forget that all of this democracy is being controlled by one or two giant, privately-held corporations. In the case of Facebook, thanks to multiple-voting shares, it\u2019s controlled by<\/a> a single individual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The risks of this kind of structure are worth remembering as well\u2014the tweets that get censored because a foreign government ordered Twitter to do so, the user data that gets passed on to security organizations, the Facebook pages that get deleted<\/a> because they fail to meet some internal test of community standards. This isn\u2019t so much a village square as a shopping mall with private security guards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite those caveats, however, there\u2019s no question that we\u2019re better off than we were before\u2014when the House could simply turn off the cameras, and foreign governments could censor the press much more easily by threatening a couple of newspapers or arresting a TV reporter or two.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, the question of whether we use those tools for exploding watermelons and the harassment of people who disagree with us is our choice. Some of that is driven by the needs of media companies as their industry gets disrupted from top to bottom, and some of it is simply an expression of human nature, multiplied a thousand-fold by networked social platforms. But at least we have a choice.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s easy to get frustrated with social media sometimes\u2014the endless inane Twitter fights, the shallow selfies and food porn on Instagram, videos of exploding watermelons and other ephemera on Facebook. But every now and then, something happens that reminds us of how powerful these platforms can truly be, especially when traditional media either isn\u2019t available … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Love them or hate them, Twitter and Facebook have democratized media”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fortune"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11755"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269685,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11755\/revisions\/269685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}