Izzy Stone and Social Media
Posted on February 18, 2009
One of my journalism heroes was I. F. Stone. “Izzy” was perhaps 1953’s premiere blogger, publishing his own muckraking newspaper from then until the early 70s, campaigning against McCarthyism and later exposing the fallacy of Lyndon Johnson’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the US excuse for plunging into the Vietnam War. Here is an excerpt from a documentary about Stone I used in my journalism classes in the 80s.
Stone was never part of the Washington social whirl. He developed his stories by poring over volumes of public records, matching one detail against another. This was before the Web…he had to do it in libraries.
Last night I attended an event in Silicon Valley put together by the Social Media Club called Government 2.0, a discussion of how tools like Facebook, Twitter, Wikis and such can and should be used in the in the public sector.
 There were representatives there from local governments, Stanford University and quite a contingent from NASA, which is using Twitter extensively. Veronica McGregor, NASA’s Twitterdona (@MarsPhoenix) told how the hour by hour story of what happens in a project has attracted a new audience of people who had never followed the space program before. NASA now has 24 missions on Twitter.
There were some stories about dysfunctions, too, of how one woman who was hired to Twitter was threatened with “timesheet fraud” because the bureaucracy insisted that Twittering on company time was against the rules; the notion that a Facebook page of “friends” might constitute an illegal secret political meeting under California’s Brown Act and that the Paperwork Reduction Act requires paperwork if a poll by some government agency if it involves more that ten people.
Clearly the rules need some tweaking in this new social media world.
What interested me most, however, was a statement by Evan Ratliff, who writes for Wired and the New Yorker about the sheer masses of electronic data that may enter the public domain under the Obama administration. I would hope that modern search tools would create a whole new generation of Izzy Stones, a different breed from the Punch and Judy journalists so common today. And social media tools would not only find the information, they would mash it up and put people (maybe journalists) together to process it. Then there is the wild-assed notion advanced by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired that we are entering The Petabite Era, where there is so much information that the whole logic of processing it may change. He says the scientific method: hypothesize, model, test, may be becoming obsolete in favor of correlating facts, letting them speak for themselves. Isn’t this what they teach in J school? If it puts Bill O’Reilly out of business, good show. But my mind reels. Given this billowing, changing information cloud the term “journalism,” seems quite archaic.
Obama is playing both sides: the old journalism and the new, courting the traditional media with frequent news conferences while reaching out using new media. But his crew has not yet figured out how to speak the new language? It was fine amidst the passion of a campaign, but now that the often dull reality of running a country is the goal, the administration’s use of new media to push its agenda has fallen back on the language of the talking point and the news release, not the breezy banter of sharing and openness you might find on a Facebook page, sort of like the screechy-voiced silent film starlet at the advent of the talkies.
So, maybe government isn’t quite ready for this or maybe it will develop a hybrid or something totally different. At least they may be seeding the cloud for a new crop of “Izzys.”
» Filed Under Culture, Tech & Science
Comments
One Response to “Izzy Stone and Social Media”
Leave a Reply
[...] that seems to permeate within agency walls. Several folks live tweeted the event (thank you) and Russell Johnson did a nice recap capturing the conversations as [...]