the news tonight

Those of you that pay any attention to me on Facebook and Twitter these days may have noticed the inordinate amount of news stories I now share on social media.  This is mainly because I spend my days staring at a computer screen, under the clever guise of a semi-corporate news consumer whose main interests lie in the realm of digital media and advertising.

What is more interesting (even to me) than a former non-consumer's sudden explosive interest in news is this: most of what I read comes packaged in blogs and trend feeds.  I learned more about the Occupy Wall Street movement from the #OccupySesameStreet hashtag and a blog post by an old friend in LA than I did from any mainstream news articles, and I've hardly even glanced at a newspaper in months.  I remember the raucous debates of Mrs. Delorme's AP English and Palczar's AP Gov class, about what kinds of sources were legit for writing papers or finding current events articles.  Wikipedia was unacceptable under any circumstances; blogs were too tainted by subjectivity, misinformation, and unqualified sources to be of any real use.  Twitter?  ...What even was that?

I'm not saying that this blog or Twitter feed are unbiased sources of information about a major movement, but they weave essential perspectives into this strand of the historical fabric.  They represent a segment of human history that may have gone largely unrecorded and unreported at another time.

Today one of the articles that jumped out at me was about a startup called Kyoo, which aggregates data from social media outlets into categories of world events, in real time, 24/7.  Essentially, this tool draws out the buzz already created by millions of web users worldwide, and packages it for further consumption -- without filtering for sarcasm, misinformation, expertise, or idiocy.  We don't need to go into the difference between "factual" and "legitimate" news sources, or whatever terms you want to use.  Truth is nebulous at best.  For all intents and purposes, reality -- especially now -- is crowdsourced.

I first encountered this titillating term in an article about the dangers of web-searching medical information, self-diagnoses, and home remedies.  Most medical web searches just create unnecessary anxiety (recall the time you developed a brain tumor during finals week, or that other time you were pregnant while actually suffering PMS).  But for women, who tend to be the source of medical knowledge in their families, crowdsourcing has to a great extent replaced the sharing of medical knowledge in the privacy of our homes while our men went out to win bread.  It works like this: someone posts, "My kid has XX symptoms," and 6 people post back, "That happened to my kid last year, this is what it was, this is what we did about it," and 8 other people post, "It could be this, my grandmother always used to..."  You get the picture.

*For the life of me I can't find this article!  I must have read it in the September issue of Better Homes and Gardens in the waiting room at Simon Eye...

But I digress.  My ultimate conclusion is that, as social media and the internet play a larger role in our daily lives, we value a different kind of information. What matters in our day-to-day interactions is what a lot of people think is important or true -- at least within our own immediate networks.

And so we crowdsource our news and our truth.  Social media gives us an active role in creating common knowledge.  We can contribute to the news.  We post our personal experiences of Hurricane Irene on Twitter, and they end up on the Weather Channel, so people all up and down the East Coast can see that the effects of this major weather event extended beyond cities big enough to have world-famous acronyms.

St. Olaf's Soc/Anthro majors learned in Quantitative Research Methods that experiential knowledge is not a valid source of information -- and yet that's what it's based on.  Who knows what really happened to the exotic animals roaming residential Ohio?  All we can know for certain is what we'll tell our kids about it.