(The following column first appeared in PR Week (subscription required).)
My friend David Weinberger, an author and deep thinker, once updated the famous Andy Warhol line for the era of the blog. Weinberger said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people.”
Fame is double-edged, of course. So an addendum: In the future, everyone will face public vilification.
The rise of online conversation has given us wonderful new ways to tell one another what we know. It’s also given people a forum with which to tear other people a proverbial new you-know-what.
Sometimes the approbation is at least understandable, even when it goes overboard. In South Korea, a young woman’s indifference to her pet’s, ahem, messy behavior aboard public transportation earned her a torrent of online abuse, to the point that her life was severely affected.
Some people have been unfairly targeted by online mobs, meanwhile. And so have some companies.
Corporate executives know they can’t please everyone all the time. But what happens when someone creates an especially compelling online rant that is downright unfair? The answer is: Get over it, but deal with it, too.
PR people know this all too well. Even a fine product can get an un-fine reputation resulting from rumors, poor reporting, or other factors a company can’t immediately counter. Conversely, clever marketing has worked wonders with lousy products. The Internet is changing the equation, slowly.
Like many other buyers of products, I now go online to see what people say about them. But the last thing I’d do is assume any individual tale is true. If I see a blizzard of similar stories, a litany of woes about a particular product or service, I have to at least ask myself whether amid all that smoke may be some flame.
What I’m getting at is the duty of the reader in a world of media-everywhere. We’ll all have to learn a modern version of old-fashioned media literacy.
I realize “media literacy” is a snore-inducing term. But it’s more vital than ever. And it’s not just about consumption anymore. It’s also about production, though I don’t think the act of posting a video on YouTube makes someone fully media-literate. Yes, it helps them understand how to create video, but they also need to understand how media are used to sell and persuade.
And when anyone can say anything about anyone (or anything) in a public forum, we must revisit the first rule that journalists learn: Be skeptical. That’s especially vital when the speaker is anonymous or using a pseudonym; anyone who doesn’t stand behind his or her own words does not deserve immediate trust.
I hope people will learn not to immediately believe anything they read, hear, or see in whatever medium – positive or negative – unless it’s from a source they have come to trust. A dollop of skepticism will go far.
This means something more: Trust will be harder than ever to earn. But once it is, it’ll probably also have more staying power.
on Sep 18th, 2006 at 8:40 am
And, according to hip British artist Banksy:
“in the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes.”
http://supertouchblog.com/?p=317#more-317
(scroll 22 photos down to the PINK TELEVISION)
on Sep 18th, 2006 at 10:21 am
It’s wonderful that Dan’s talking about media literacy, but quite humorous that he refers to “old-fashioned media literacy” when educators and advocates have been struggling for a few decades here in the U.S. to get general public recognition and understanding of the mere phrase “media literacy” anywhere above the 20-30% threshold (I’m guessing at this figure but it’s nowhere near even 50%).
The most comprehensive conference for teaching and learning about media literacy (the bi-annual National Media Education Conference) will be the last weekend in June of 2007 in St. Louis, Missouri. I’m doing volunteer publicity work for it. If interested visit http://www.amlainfo.org. There’s minimal conference info on there right now but you can check out the sponsoring group of good folks, the Alliance for a Media Literate America.
Use the Contact form (link on bottom nav bar) to request that you be added to an email list they will develop for conference updates. (And I’ll ask them to install an easy sign-up form for getting conference email notices.)
Susan Rogers
on Sep 19th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Noble sentiments. But what if your audience – which, after all, is professional manipulators – draws the exact opposite conclusion than you intend? While people *should* “learn not to immediately believe anything they read”, suppose the PR flacks work from the premise that they *will* believe it anyway? And so there’s a whole new set of opportunites now for faking sincerity and gaining false trust. In a nutshell, “Truthiness”.
By the way, though David Weinberger may have independently invented the quote, no harm in that, it does pre-date him, usually to a 1991 essay by “Momus”.
http://imomus.com/index499.html
on Sep 19th, 2006 at 5:08 am
Seth, this is one of my goals over time — to push hard for this level of skepticism among nonprofessional communicators. (If my only audience is the pros, then I’m going to fail.)
Some PR folks will undoubtedly see this medium as a way to fool people, and I hope that there will be enough brains and eyeballs out here to call them on such things.
on Sep 19th, 2006 at 7:01 am
[…] Se Warhol nos abriu as portas a um mundo em que todos teriamos acesso a 15 minutos de fama há quem nos diga agora (o controverso artista britânico Bansky) que no futuro próximo todos vamos poder ser anónimos por 15 minutos. A auto-publicação é, a cada ano que passa e a cada nova onda de ferramentas e utensílios que surge, cada vez mais parte da existência de um número maior de pessoas mas isso não é necessariamente mau (como parece sugerir o mais recente famoso/marginal do mundo da arte contemporânea). Por isso me parece mais honesta a variação da conhecida frase proposta por David Weinberger: todos vamos ser famosos para 15 pessoas. Assim sendo, importará saber viver num novo mundo mediático de múltiplas vozes sabendo distingui-las por algo mais do que os decibéis do volume. A chave – diz-nos Dan Gillmor – está no cepticismo; deve ser grande e permanente. I hope people will learn not to immediately believe anything they read, hear, or see in whatever medium – positive or negative – unless it’s from a source they have come to trust. A dollop of skepticism will go far. This means something more: Trust will be harder than ever to earn. But once it is, it’ll probably also have more staying power. […]