collective intelligence

How is collective intelligence being used in journalism?

First of all one has to explain the term collective intelligence before going into details about how journalism uses it for its advantage.
Collective intelligence is shared intelligence created by a group of individuals which are collaborating and competing often to make decisions or to come up with ideas. Lévy and Kerckhove relate the term to ‘the capacity of networked ICTs to exponentially enhance the collective pool of social knowledge’ by supporting social networks and thus human interaction, meaning that the more people participate in this process and share their thoughts, the better and bigger information is going to be (Flew, 2008).

 

This concept is only possible due to the development of the Web, which goal it became to make users share knowledge and to unite them in a global sense. As data is travelling faster than ever, people who should actually be distant towards one another from a geographical point of view, are connected through networks. Social media has an impact on how we mistake those massive online platforms for a global village, resulting in re-writing social order.

The number of participants is constantly growing and that’s what makes collective intelligence an on-going progress. Contributing to knowledge sources became an ordinary thing to do, not least because of social networks like ‘Facebook’, ‘Twitter’ or ‘Wikipedia’, encouraging people to be part of the interactivity.

If more and more people just share their knowledge for free how can it be an advantage for journalism and not destroy the whole business? I am going to concentrate on that question and tell you how collective intelligence can be valuable to journalists by bringing the social network ‘Twitter’ into the picture.

 

Twitter has 554,750,000 users (July 2013) and this number is growing on a daily basis, which makes it one of the biggest interactive sites on the web. Just as most of us, lots of celebrities also like to share their thoughts, activities and news via Twitter; all one has to do to access this information is to ‘follow’ them. Journalists can skip the interviews and press conferences and simply observe their tweets to find out about the newest scandals. Of course it does not always work that way and the press still has to research, but recent cases have shown that more and more celebs have stories published they tweeted out to the world instead of telling journalists exclusively.

However people are not the only reason why journalists need to stay up to date on ‘Twitter’, furthermore there are events to be discovered, disputes to be foreshadowed or news to be published. People are tweeting about everything, but most of all when something extraordinary happens to or around them, for example an earthquake. When the earth is trembling somewhere, social networks are the first to know about it. Hence, in order to report fast; journalists need to use the tweeted content and turn it into news. Moreover social media delivers the witnesses willing to tell their stories, Poonam Sagar tweeted in 2009: ‘entire office building creaked and swayed with the earthquake tremors’.

 

Furthermore journalists can now interact with the audience, they can analyse people’s response to tweets, discover new sources or get help with research through crowdsourcing. (Posetti; 2009) As users mostly follow those with similar interests it is very possible that followers will either reply to questions or re-tweet to help the researcher. This does not only facilitate a journalist’s work, it also saves time.

Not only can journalists get ideas for their stories by using ‘Twitter’, furthermore they can share their stories on a global level and easily create an audience and discussions. The purpose of journalism is after all to inform, entertain and educate people and this can only happen if their stories are read. Posting something on twitter makes news appear lighter, it is supposed to be a fun network where people interact because they want to and if they read a journalist’s tweets it is because they want to know more about a certain story.

All in all, collective intelligence is a tool for media and thus for journalism, it can be used in a valuable way but it can also drag along negative points. Journalism survived social media and even evolved because of it, therefore I do not believe that sharing information which is the main purpose of journalism can be such a bad thing. Knowledge is no longer narrow casted, people can connect and discuss and by that attribute to nowadays work of a journalist.

And as ‘Twitter’ is supposed to be a light and fun topic, here’s a little video for you that I found on ‘youtube’ to explain the network’s purpose in a quick and funny way:

 

 

References:

Flew, T. (2008). New Media an introduction, 3^rd edition. Victoria: Oxford University Press.

Twitter, Huffington Post, eMarketer (2013). Twitter Statistics. Retrieved from: http://www.statisticbrain.com/twitter-statistics/

Buttry, S. (2012). 10 ways Twitter is valuable to journalists, online article retrieved from: http://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/10-ways-twitter-is-valuable-to-journalists/

Posetti, J. (2009).  Twitter’s Difficult Gift to Journalism. NewMatilda.com, http://newmatilda.com/2009/06/16/twitters-difficult-gift-journalism

Hooper, J. (2013). Digital Media and Society, Week 5 Lecture. Gold Coast, Bond University

Franklin, B. (2010) Journalism Practice, volume 4. Retrieved from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512781003640703#tabModule

Franklin, B. (2010) Journalism Practice, volume 5. Retrieved from: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17512786.2010.551018#tabModule

Lévy, P. (1999) Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace. Cambridge:Perseur Books.

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.