The January edition of UBC Reports, published under the title The Next Big Thing, asked researchers at the University of British Columbia what was coming. Alfred Hermida’s contribution was about collaborative story-telling on social media — stories told together, one tweet at a time.
The premise was that journalism had become ambient and was being produced by professionals and citizens alike: people sharing experiences, photos, videos and links on Facebook and Twitter were committing acts of journalism, whether or not anyone called it that. The difficulty was volume. The piece met the obvious objection head on by pointing out that fear of information overload was not new — comparable alarm followed the thousands of books that Gutenberg’s press made possible.
What changed was the position of the journalist. The traditional role had been to filter, organise and interpret information, then deliver it as a finished package; with thousands of acts of journalism scattered across social media, no individual can hold the collective sum of what is contained in the fragments. The forecast for 2011 was therefore about machinery rather than about reporters: media systems that process, analyse and contextualise the data, and a crop of new tools and services competing to derive meaning from streams of connected data.