Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (22 page)

Speaking of the power of photos, I was recently talking with the founder of an amazing SF Bay Area meal delivery service called Munchery. They send out daily e-mails with images of the food available for delivery that evening, and he told me that those e-mails get incredibly high open rates, much higher than the industry average for e-mail newsletters. When he surveyed some of his customers, they said they view the newsletter as “food porn” and look forward to opening the menus every day, even if they are out of town and not planning to order anything that evening.

Knowing how to reach people in an emotional way, and by using a universal language, can do more than just create a viral sensation or make people hungry. It might even mean the difference between war and peace. Take, for example the story of Ronny Edry.

In March 2012 an Israeli graphic designer named Ronny Edry, responding to the talk of war between Israel and Iran, posted on his Facebook wall an image of himself, holding his young daughter and the Israeli flag, below text that said, “Iranians, we will never bomb your country. We
you.” Within days, this image was liked and shared by thousands of people, including Iranians, some of whom meme’d their own posters, one of which read, “My Israeli friends. I don’t hate you. I don’t want war. Love
Peace.”

Suddenly, for the first time, enabled by social networking, Israeli and Iranian people were talking directly to one another, and to the world. Almost by accident, Ronny Edry started a peace movement, led by individuals and spread by likes and shares on Facebook and social media.

Perhaps something as simple as a message of peace and love will prove insufficient to stop wars, but as Ronny wrote on one of his later posters, “Making peace is a simple process that starts with each and every one of us. Every time we are sending a heart, it’s another brick in the bridge we are building. Send a heart = make peace.”

When we want to change the world, we don’t need to look very far. There are movements everywhere crying out for the world’s attention. If we speak the language of the world, we can work together to improve the lives of people everywhere, faster and with greater impact than ever before.

#letsgochangetheworld

chapter 10

FUTURE

Everyone’s a Media Company Now

I
t was the summer of 2011. I was standing in a checkout aisle of a Silicon Valley Target and getting in a quick round of Angry Birds. The green pig was teetering on the edge of the ledge, about to fall . . . any second now . . .

“Darn it!”

As I prepared to fire another bird, I was interrupted by a phone call that was slightly more important—and definitely the least likely phone conversation to have in a checkout line. It was my friend Andrew Morse, the senior producer at ABC News
.
He and I had worked together for the better part of eighteen months on our election-related collaboration at Facebook, back in 2007 and 2008 and then again on the midterm elections in 2010.

“Randi, congratulations! We’ve been nominated for an Emmy!”

I didn’t believe it. In fact, I was so surprised that I could only stammer out a brief “Thanks! Congrats to you too!” before I hung up. And it wasn’t until I got home and furiously Googled my name that I saw I had indeed been included in the team of correspondents nominated by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, for Outstanding Live Coverage of a Current News Story—Long Form, for our work during the ABC-Facebook
Election 2010
coverage.

I suppose I had always assumed that if I was ever nominated for this sort of thing, I would find out when a man in a powdered wig would alight from a carriage, ring my doorbell, and with his white gloves, lift up one of those silver platter covers and present me with a calligraphy-inscribed envelope requesting my presence at the awards. But a phone call in Target was just as memorable, I suppose.

Plus, I got to say, entirely truthfully, that it really was an honor just to be nominated.

The ABC-Facebook 2010 election-night coverage played a key role in shaping my understanding of the increasing convergence between technology and the media.

During the ABC broadcast, I moderated a digital town hall at Arizona State University. My role was to integrate the traditional television coverage with the discussions taking place simultaneously on the U.S. Politics app on Facebook. The topics were a combination of serious news and crowdsourced discussions, ranging from tax cuts to war to the legalization of marijuana. While Diane Sawyer was the main election-night television anchor, ABC News’ David Muir and I served as online correspondents, and the three of us engaged back and forth with one another over the course of the evening.

It was very exciting and very new. Working on a project that took advantage of both Facebook and the awesome power of television cameras gave me an incredible feeling of being at the epicenter of a new way of experiencing information and entertainment—a convergence between old and new media, and between television and the Internet.

I was quite literally seated at the intersection of television and the Internet, trying on one hand to talk to the television audience while at the same time interacting with the digital audience and feeding real-time insights to Diane Sawyer on-air. As it happened, I truly did have a front-seat view of a revolution in broadcasting and entertainment that forever altered people’s ability to hear and be heard.

As recently as ten years ago, television and movie studios had a monopoly on how content was produced and distributed. Even amateur home movies of people hurting themselves were distributed to the masses only through televised platforms like
America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Though it seems hard to recall now, it wasn’t that long ago when we were struggling to watch videos via a dial-up modem, record clips with terrible and complex camcorders, and upload our creations online. Sure, if you were using 3.5-inch disks to upload fifteen-second clips from your digital Sony Mavica onto Broadcast .com in 1999, you were ahead of the curve, but you were also the exception.

Now the ability to broadcast to everyone is universal, and the wildest dreams of the craziest futurists from the 1990s are a reality. Today, everyone is a journalist, everyone is an art gallery, everyone is a newspaper, a magazine, and a wire service, all in one.

And everyone is a mini media empire.

Once, if you wanted a mass audience for anything, whether it was art in a gallery or a show on television, you first had to get the approval of a few content gatekeepers. There was, after all, only so much gallery space or bandwidth to go around. And so, if your work was going to be shown, it had to be mostly profitable.

This is no longer the case. As long as you have a smartphone with a data connection, the whole world can be your audience. Thanks to the Internet, there are no more gatekeepers. There are no more limits on the human imagination.

This means that the artistic “scene” is no longer confined to the cultural enclaves of the big cities. Global cultural touchstones can and will come from everywhere—from the Harlem Shake to Gangnam Style, from Keyboard Cat to Grumpy Cat, from Nyan Cat to Lil Bub, and to the goats that yell like people.

This also means that a single person with a Twitter account and a good vantage point can give better on-the-scene news reports than the professional reporters. For example, during the recent tragic events at the Boston Marathon, Twitter was the go-to site for facts and information about the ongoing state of affairs. People no longer needed the news media to provide “coverage.” They could go straight to the primary sources. At the time of the bombing suspect’s ultimate capture, some 250,000 people were tuned in live to a simple webcam pointed at a Boston police scanner, which was being broadcast over the site Ustream.tv. Throughout the course of the chase, some 2.5 million people listened to this one scanner. Those are some serious ratings for a radio.

Under the right set of circumstances, and with enough talent, a random guy with an iPhone can be more influential than mainstream TV news. This is not to discount the tremendous talents who work on these shows. Nor is it the case that these shows won’t still be important. It’s just to acknowledge a truth already widespread: that the barriers to distribution have fallen, and it’s open season on people’s attention.

Of course, there’s naturally a downside to the democratization of broadcast media and the de facto elimination of gatekeepers. Even if everyone is a media company, not everybody abides by broadcast standards and practices.

Because we’re all so obsessed with “breaking news” and entertaining our followers within our own networks, with being perceived as the ones in the know and the first to the information—so much so that we now place more value on being fast than on being accurate—we put less value on being thoughtful, having an intelligent opinion, or taking other people’s feelings and potential consequences into account. The pace of journalism has picked up so much that narratives are giving way to facts and, in the process, sacrificing understanding.

There are dangers to living life within a tweet’s 140-character limit. Just because your average, everyday citizen
can
serve as a news source, that doesn’t mean he or she should. Reputations of people, businesses, governments, artists, and ideas can all be built up or torn down in the blink of an eye or the push of a button.

The widespread dissemination of inaccurate or misunderstood information could have devastating real-life consequences. Wall Street traders rely on trading algorithms that read tweets for news about the world, and they automatically execute trades based on bad news. Also, people may be wrongly accused of crimes by the hive mind.

Take, for example, Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who went missing in the weeks prior to the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013. When the manhunt for the bombing suspects was just getting started, the website Reddit—a popular and anonymous bulletin board—“up-voted” to their front page a story identifying Sunil as the main suspect. There was even a congratulatory post titled “Reddit gets it right,” lauding the site’s many users for correctly speculating that the bomber was the missing student. Within a few hours, the actual suspects were named, and the manhunt for them continued in earnest, but not before the Facebook page set up to help find Sunil was bombarded with inflammatory and painful statements from anonymous strangers. A few days later, the owners of Reddit issued a public apology, but by then the damage was done.

Giving everyone a megaphone tends to create a society that favors the loud and self-absorbed. Just because a lot of people are talking all at once doesn’t mean anything valuable is being said.

In a world where everyone thinks of themselves as a leader, and everyone is shouting at their “followers,” is anyone really listening?

The entire notion of celebrity has changed, but it hasn’t necessarily been for the better. Your average citizens can go from being anonymous nobodies to being insta-famous, and sometimes without their consent or knowledge. Twitter makes it easier to be nice to established celebrities, but it’s also easier to be really mean to them.

Everyone everywhere, no matter what they’re doing, will stop in their tracks to watch a fight. It’s almost an intrinsic human instinct. So, when someone uses the high platform of the Internet to tear someone else down, it’ll collect hits for the sake of hits, but that may be all.

How do we navigate this new media environment? Who can we trust to get information both fast and right?

For starters, although certain websites that favor anonymity may have a hard time embracing the concept of authentic identity online, they should at a minimum embrace the notion that these are real people, whose real lives can be seriously affected by anonymous comments, and therefore try to act accordingly. When the mob is anonymous, it’s also ephemeral and can vanish into the shadows of a deleted account when everything goes terribly wrong. Mobs have always sheltered and enabled bad behavior by way of the protection provided by anonymity. Online mobs are no different.

As for breaking news, it’s probably better to review a variety of sources on Twitter and wait for a narrative to emerge from the gathering facts before jumping to conclusions. Speed doesn’t equal quality, and we shouldn’t believe everything we hear or retweet everything we see tweeted.

Finally, embracing authentic identity online means that, if you would not hurl abuse at someone’s face in person, don’t do it online either.

By the same token, don’t be afraid to participate in the discussion taking place online. Your opinions are as valuable as anyone else’s, and all the more valuable to your friends. The convergence of tech and media plus the elimination of traditional barriers to mass communication, while certainly complicating the media scene, have also made it possible to participate in the discussion in a way never really possible before.

As I sat in the correspondent’s chair during the ABC-Facebook
Election 2010
broadcast, I had the chance to communicate to the television audience the thoughts of members of that audience. Like any good moderator, I chose the best things to say, as I saw them. Your voice might as well be one of them.

As it happened, the ABC-Facebook team didn’t win the Emmy that year. That honor went to Anderson Cooper, reporting from a ditch in hurricane-ravaged Haiti, looking flawless in his tight gray T-shirt, even while surrounded by disaster. We didn’t stand a chance. But it’s all good.

Tech and Pop Culture

Before our
Election 2010
coverage, ABC News and Facebook had teamed up in 2009 to do some digital coverage at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas. We were just wrapping up after a four-hour broadcast from the Facebook party-developer garage when the publicist for a tall, bouffant-ish British fellow named Russell Brand abruptly appeared and asked us to interview his client. Nobody had ever heard of the guy, but he had a movie coming out called
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
. I agreed to do the interview.

Things quickly went right off the rails.

No sooner had I mentioned Facebook than he replied he had a better idea for a social network called Cockbook. I’m not sure if he meant a social network dedicated to junk in general or just his. Needless to say, the interview ended pretty quickly.

I decided not to propose the idea to the Facebook board. But I was happy to be doing interviews and a little surprised at the fact that, without a television network to call my own, I had nevertheless ended up as an entertainment correspondent. This is all thanks to the Internet.

Technological revolutions have always produced new kinds of public figures. There were no movie stars before Thomas Edison invented the movie camera. Technological progress has always influenced what people read, watch, and listen to. And pop culture is being defined more than almost anything by technology and the Internet.

Back in the early days of Facebook, one of my first tasks in consumer marketing was to manage how our company was mentioned in movies, TV, and print media. I estimated that the kind of free marketing we could get was worth somewhere in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars. Nevertheless, we turned a lot of it down.