Citizen journalism has a cost

Normally, I’m pretty gung-ho for social media and cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism. I really do believe that jour­nal­ism isn’t some high-and-mighty, elit­ist pro­fes­sion. Real peo­ple with drive and curios­ity can report news and write analy­sis, regard­less of their educations.

As such, cit­i­zen report­ing is a good thing because I gen­er­ally think “the more infor­ma­tion to work with, the bet­ter,” no mat­ter the source. As respon­si­ble pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists, it’s our job to fil­ter through that infor­ma­tion and present the best ver­sion of the truth we can at the time we have to pub­lish it.

That said, I’m not blind. I know that social media has its dark side. When those of us with cell phone cam­eras and pocket HD cams get hyp­no­tized by the viewfinder and see the events around us as more break­ing news and less real life, we cross into dan­ger­ous, almost inhu­man territory.

In the wake of the Fort Hood shoot­ings, Paul Carr wrote an essay for TechCrunch that crit­i­cizes a blog­ger at the base for send­ing out tweets from within. He acknowl­edges that this woman prob­a­bly thought she was doing the right thing by spread­ing infor­ma­tion, but the fact is that she was wrong on almost every detail she tweeted.

Here are three para­graphs from his essay. I urge you to read it in its entirety at TechCrunch because we need to remem­ber that liv­ing in this wired world has a price.

And so it was at Fort Hood. For all the sound and fury, cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism once again did noth­ing but spread mis­in­for­ma­tion at a time when thou­sands peo­ple with fam­ily at the base would have been freak­ing out already, and breach the pri­vacy of those who had been killed or wounded. We learned not a sin­gle new fact, nor was a sin­gle life saved.

What’s most alarm­ing about Moore’s behav­iour is that she prob­a­bly thought she was doing the right thing. Certainly, look­ing at her MySpace page and her Twitter account (before the army finally forced her to lock it down) we see the por­trait of a patriot. Someone who clearly cares a great deal about oth­ers, and who – despite the rhetor­i­cal ques­tion “remind me why I joined the army again” on her pro­file – is proud to serve her coun­try. In tweet­ing from the scene, and call­ing out the media for not report­ing the rumours from inside the base, I’m sure she gen­uinely believed she was help­ing get the real truth out, and mak­ing an actual difference.

And that’s pre­cisely the prob­lem: none of us think we’re being self­ish or ego­tis­tic when we tweet some­thing, or post a video on YouTube or check-in using someone’s address on Foursquare. It’s just what we do now, no mat­ter whether we’re head­ing out for din­ner or wit­ness­ing a mas­sacre on an Army base. Like Lord of the Flies, or the Stanford Prison Experiment, as long as we’re all los­ing our per­spec­tive at the same time – which, as a gen­er­a­tion grow­ing up with social media we are – then we don’t realise that our human­ity is leak­ing away until its too late.

Edit: More thoughts on Carr