At The Speed of Sound

This was written by Dr Claire Wardle and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the 3rd October 2012. Claire is Director of News Services at Storyful, a social media news agency. Claire completed an MA and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania and subsequently taught at Cardiff University, at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. She left Cardiff to design and deliver the social media training programme for BBC News, and has worked with other media organisations and NGOs around the world, before joining Storyful in the Spring 2012. On the 5th September, at 2.42pm there was a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Costa Rica. The shockwaves travelled at 4.8 km per sec and reached the city of Managua in Nicaragua 247 km away in just over 60 seconds.

I work for a social media news agency where we constantly monitor social networks for news content. 90 seconds after the quake hit Costa Rica our list of Nicaraguan twitter users lit up with the word Temmmmmmmmbloooooorrrrrr! Thats earthquake in Spanish. In 90 seconds the shockwave had travelled 250 km, rumbled the ground, and driven people to take their phones out of their pockets to tweet that the earth was moving.

The impact of social networks for newsgathering is huge. There is more information from people witnessing news events from the ground than ever before, and as a result more pictures, videos and sources. But theres also a downside. The ability of people to click one retweet button means that false information can also spread as fast as those earthquake alerts. One such example was the tragic death of the Welsh football manager Gary Speed last year, which was quickly followed up by people posting and reposting rumours and speculation about the reasons he had taken his own life. And every week social media kills off one celebrity or another, although elderly politicians, Margaret Thatcher or Nelson Mandela are the most frequent targets.

In the charity space, there is a similar tension. The KONY2012 video, the 30 minute youtube film telling the story of the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony as if it was a Hollywood blockbuster pitting good against evil, was viewed over 50 million times in 4 days. As it rocketed across social networks a number of news editors expressed shock that their teenage children and not their staff had informed them of the video. But it quickly turned out many people werent actually watching the film, they were retweeting and sharing on Facebook, to look like the type of person who cares about African war mongers. There is a quite a lot of evidence of this type of behaviour; the numbers of people sharing a particularly heartwrenching appeal do not match actual clicks on the stories themselves. This leads to calls of slacktivism, a generation of people happy to click their dislike or like for something from the comfort of their laptop but less likely to volunteer. I firmly disagree with this, and its the subject of another essay, but at the root of all of this is speed. Its the speed at which information is travelling that we cant get our heads around.

Research in March in the US showed that on average teenagers send 60 text messages per day. 60. And thats on average. Its hard for many people who did not grow up with this technology to grasp, and even easier to dismiss this behaviour outright. But in-depth qualitative research on teenagers and new technology undertaken by danah boyd (preferred spelling) shows that young people use text messages as a critical form of communication, to keep family and friends aware of their movements and overcoming overscheduled lives and limited transportation options.

These millions of text messages whizzing around the globe inevitably raise the difficult questions of cyberbullying and sexting, and make it tempting to snatch a phone out of a passing childs hands, but there is more and more research showing that digital technology is providing an important lifeline for introverted teenagers. For those crippled with shyness or depression, being able to reach out to online communities interested in similar topics and hobbies can be enormously comforting. 2

But lets stop here and focus on something, otherwise were going to be falling into the same the web as utopian dream versus the web is making us all stupid debate.

My particular area of interest is identity and how it plays out in spaces where you can post your own information or share someone elses at a click of a mouse. As the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman argued in his seminal book from 1959 The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, all social interactions can be seen as a series of interactive performances. Actors are constantly altering their presentation based on their assumptions about what is acceptable in a particular situation and the reactions that they receive from others. People perform aspects of themselves in order to generate specific impressions, often so that others will perceive them in a positive light. Goffmans description of behaviour works offline, when you adjust your clothing, choice of words, and table manners depending on your immediate audience. How do people work out what is acceptable when theyre sending a tweet that could technically be read by anyone around the world? We all know examples of online behaviour that arent acceptable. The tweet by Aiden Burley describing the Olympics opening ceremony as leftie multicultural crap, or the abuse hurled at Tom Daley after his first performances on the diving board. One of these was written by someone high profile, the other directed at someone with a high profile. The intersection of the online world and celebrity, and the access it provides both to people seeing their heroes, warts and all, as well as the ability to directly connect with them, is another subject entirely. But you could argue the social norms around these interactions are slowly being developed as people learn the new rules.

Other infamous cases include the tweet by Paul Chambers threatening to blow Robin Hood airport sky high. He was arrested and charged, but recently 3

his appeal was successfully upheld, when it was finally agreed that no serious harm could have been intended by a tweet sent by someone using his own name. Discussion about the trial has focused on the inability of airport staff to get a joke, and while the appeal ruling was clearly correct, the fact that it took Chambers two and half years to clear his name demonstrates the very serious potential consequences of a misjudged tweet.

A less famous, but one that had more impact in terms of companies developing social media guidelines was a case from the Autumn of 2010. Channel 4s Dispatches aired a documentary about domestic help and the abuse of foreign workers. During the airing of the programme, a viewer tweeted that bloody maid needs a slap along with other derogatory comments. A number of charities were following the conversation on Twitter, Googled her username and found the womans profile on Linkedin. They quickly discovered she was a management consultant for Brent Council, and as a direct result of her comments she was sacked, despite arguing she had made the comments in jest.

For many employers it was a wake up call, that maybe the rather dullsounding memo from HR about writing social media guidelines was not an email that should have been placed in the to-do folder. For employees, it was a reminder that even the disclaimer these are my own views, not those of my employer plastered on their social profiles would not save you.

Much good work has been done in terms of considering identity and how it works online. Theorists like MITs Sherry Turkle have talked about the web being an identity laboratory. People can play around with who they are and who they want to be. As the journalist Aleks Krotoski wrote unlike the rich space of offline life, where our identity cues are given away on sight, sound, smell, touch and taste, online we perform.

But this is easier said than done. When were online, we technically know what we say is public, our views on the latest episode of Eastenders, or Camerons reshuffle the equivalent of a billboard on the High Street. However, recent research shows that we live in imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson described them. As we post to Twitter, we are posting with a few key people in mind, forgetting that a search by someone in Brazil could bring up the same information. On Facebook, were posting for our closest friends, forgetting that amongst our lists of friends sit ex-colleagues, lovers and that person you never did get on with at school.

We rarely think long enough about how our imagined community includes our boss or someone who could tell our boss. An Apple employee was sacked for breaking the company policy by writing something negative about the iPhone on his private Facebook page. A so-called friend and colleague told his manager.

This is an example of how we also trust these spaces. We use them so often, we are seduced. They feel like small, personal spaces, inhabited by people weve built relationships with (either off or online), even though we know that theyre not.

The ethics of using public online communities as data is something that troubles University ethics committees. Research with people who post to message boards about their golden retrievers health problems, or their love of Northampton Town Football Club, or more troubling their abusive husbands or struggles with anorexia, were appalled that researchers would be reading their posts without introducing themselves and asking for permission to be there. The problem, researchers argue, is that by introducing themselves, the members of the group would start performing for a different audience, and the authenticity of the community discussion would be lost.

Teenagers share the same concerns, feeling violated when posts between friends can not be kept from their parents prying eyes. Research by danah boyd, the leading American student of social media, shows very clearly the everyday struggles they have with privacy. Teenagers know what they should and shouldnt be posting in terms of the dangers presented by online paedophiles, and want to feel able to post information to their friends without fear of their parents simply watching for the sake of watching. These teenagers felt distressed that the social norms of privacy that meant parents wouldnt walk into their bedrooms unannounced was not being matched by parents when it came to their spaces online.

As well as privacy, the other impediment to controlling identity online is the allure of the crowd; the temptation to fit in. Many times you hear Twitter described as a witch-hunt. People were just jumping on the band-wagon. The normal regulatory forces disappear as people click ReTweet without thinking. Anger is raised and people are whipped into a frenzy that would be unthinkable if the same person had heard the news in a pub or over a cup of coffee.

The New York Times carried out research into what makes people share information on social networks and one of the most powerful forces is the desire to be the first with new information.

On every online news article and blog post, there are little social widgets that show you how many people have already RTed or shared the post on Twitter and Facebook. As those numbers increase, research shows people are significantly less likely to share. If the numbers are re-set to zero, the sharing starts again.

The combination of the desire to be the first with the information, and the fact that normal regulatory forces disappear in the crowd atmosphere of social networks is the cause of slip-ups and mistakes. When we see long in the teeth journalists RTing false information, your heart stops. Over the summer, 6

reputable UK journalists were seen RTing a false Carla Bruni account purporting that Margaret Thatcher had died. That they didnt stop to wonder why Carla Bruni was the first with this information was particularly strange. How can this happen? Its actually quite easy to see how it happens. This isnt a rational decision. There is no consideration of journalism training or a consideration of what this means for their professional identity. The addictive quality of the social web takes over. The desire to be first with new information dominates. The famous quote has always been that on the internet no-one knows youre a dog. Online, anonymity is very easy.

Early forms of online communities were characterised by anonymous usernames. People could, and did pretend to be whoever they wanted to be and often created wild personas within the safety of the online community.

Facebook and Google+ created much distress and anger when they forced people to connect their accounts to real names. This move has been welcomed in part by people who believe anonymity leads to a lack of accountability and use the evidence of trolling the technical term for abuse of others online to demonstrate this. Whether thats in online comments under newspaper stories, or tweeters abusing celebrities, most days we hear about this type of behaviour. And while most people would agree this type of behaviour is far from acceptable, wrapping our online personas so tightly with our offline ones, means as time goes on, and more of our lives are available online, difficult decisions ensue. You cant erase your past and start again. At the simplest, what happens when you move jobs, and shift from policing to the developmental sector, banking to teaching? Your professional digital footprint suddenly looks very odd. What happens when you divorce? Do you unfriend all of your ex-partners family on Facebook?

How do employers cope as theyre increasingly hiring people who have always lived their lives online. This can pose big questions for organisations dedicated to maintaining social and political impartiality and evenhandedness. A couple of years ago, the BBC hired a couple of new reporters at its DC bureau. They had both just left college, and as a result had lived for the past six years on social networks. They were hired because they were impressive young journalists. But as their appointments were announced the BBC was accused of bias. Impartiality was questioned as a blogger described in detail the political and religious views of the new journalists, using information available from the many blog posts they had written during their University years.

Of course you can argue that previously journalists could retain their ability to report impartiality. Their personal views were never shared, outside dinner parties or pub conversations with friends. Now, however, over time, the 21st century experience of these young journalists will be the norm. Every new recruit will have an online past. Exactly what this will do for the way impartiality is viewed in the future is, like so much in this field, a work in progress.

As a result of these types of incidents, a cottage industry has developed in companies that promise to purge your digital footprint. To use search technologies to move that embarrassing picture or article from Googles front page. But only the most rich and famous can afford these, for the rest of us, its a case of using common sense every day, and turning the phone off after one too many drinks. So what to do in this age when the complexity of identity cant be mapped exactly onto social networks and the addictive quality of the social web causes even the most sensible among us to post something we shouldnt?

This is an incredible time, and I love the idea of academics in two hundred years time studying this period, and wondering at the way we navigated our way through these tensions between professional and private identities.

If technology can not provide the solution, the combination of human selfcontrol and technology is always going to be doomed. Instead maybe we have to learn to be more forgiving of the rogue tweets, acknowledge that journalists do have opinions, and recognise it is foolish to dismiss qualified candidates just because embarrassing photos from college exist on page three of a Google search. And as the announcement by the Director of Public Prosecutions a couple of weeks ago that he was to issue guidelines about handling the prosecutions of online abusers shows, we are quickly having to find new ways of dealing with and arbitrating these rapidly evolving issues.

Ten years ago, we were in control of our offline identities. Cultural cues and social norms guided our behaviour. Our online identities were also pretty assured. If your email address was linked to yourself, you mirrored your offline personas. If you email address was monkeyspanner@emailaddress.co.uk, you were free to create an identity that was whomever you wanted to be.

Now, as Google and Facebook try to create networks that mimic the complexities of our everyday lives, by allowing us to place friends in lists, so we post pictures of babies to closest friends only, professional articles to just our work colleagues, and funny youtube videos of cats to the world, our online worlds are becoming as complicated as our offline worlds.

As our digital footprints become bigger, it will be harder and harder to play with our identities. The idea of a blind date is now almost impossible if you have even the most basic information about someone, massaging your CV increasingly difficult, and sloppy journalism unthinkable. The amount of information to which we now have access, and the speed with which we can access it, is fundamentally changing our human relationships as well as personal and professional conduct.

Identity navigation has always been complex. Were just adjusting to some new realities. All we can do is adapt to this new situation we find ourselves in, and use our common sense.

And for those times when common sense has left us, maybe after one too many, late into the night, our phones should be smart enough to send us a message: are you sure you want to post this right now?

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