Time has got to be the most valuable commodity that there is. With only so many minutes in a day, days in a year, and years in a lifetime, we seek to optimize our finite hours as best we can. Humanity has developed a number of methods to manage time, including creating mechanisms to measure it, and communication technologies to conquer it. Information sharing has always occurred among and between communities, but the rate of sharing has grown faster and faster thanks to developments like language, writing, printing, telegraphy, photography and radio, among others.

Serving this growth in information sharing has been a long tradition of journalism, in which private individuals and organizations would take it upon themselves to record events and facts for the purpose of sharing that information with the public via the contemporary communication technologies. Investigating and exposing stories of public interest is an important job of journalism, but another role that has traditionally been equally important has been to use its editorial judgment to function as a reputable agenda-setter in public discourse.

In our contemporary setting, the traditional media’s ability to set the agenda is diminishing, and nowhere does this seem more clear to me than in the lamentable over-extension of the definition of ‘breaking news’. Breaking news as we know it dates to the radio era, and was used sparingly – only when the significance of the story was such that it warranted interrupting the scheduled broadcast. One could convincingly argue that breaking news is platform neutral, and that news ‘breaks’ when it is first learned by a given individual, but I will stick with radio as the example of the first mass media communication technology to engage in the practice of delivering breaking news bulletins.

Today, however, news organizations have established channels of communication that are devoted to ‘breaking news’ – I receive ‘breaking news’ alerts by SMS from the likes of the New York Times and CNN, and of course Twitter has gained much notoriety for providing breaking news alerts. In this situation, the context of ‘breaking news’ transforms itself. It is no longer the late-arriving information that is of cardinal importance and must interrupt the scheduled broadcast. It is, instead, now merely the latest information that the editors think you should know, even if the information is not so significant that they would have interrupted an old-fashioned broadcast to share it.

One could argue that the questionable editorial judgment shown on these new “breaking news” feeds does not measure up to that of earlier generations of broadcasters, but I think that this misses the point. What is more significant is that Breaking News has come to be more about freshness than importance, and this reflects the way in which time has become of ever greater value in a communication paradigm where news travels across the globe in a keystroke. In a culture that values ‘newness’ over significance, then it will always be a race to be the first to publish – even if that often means racing to publish inane nonsense.

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Filed under: Features, Journalism
Posted by: Richard
On: Thursday, August 27th

All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All that’s to come
and everything under the sun

-”Eclipse“, from Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

What defines your individuality on the network? Is it the things that you do, the things that you say and the people that you interact with, as well as the things that you have done in the past and those that you will do in the future? How does one individuate themselves on the network, and what are the costs and benefits of this kind of identification? I would argue that an individual’s characteristics and actions are indeed important components of their identity, and that they are being increasingly tracked and analyzed across an ever-growing number of vectors.

Increasing amounts of data are being collected and mined for insights into each individual identity, searching for ways that it can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of services delivered according to the specific characteristics of a given individual. This may range from the use of genetic profiling in an effort to personalize a medical treatment regimen, to building a purchasing history database at the super market with a loyalty program that offers discounts to members. In these systems, individuality is defined by both the given characteristics of an individual (their genes, their average checkout ticket value), and the actions that they undertake which differentiate one patient or consumer from another (reacting to a discovery of susceptibility to a form of cancer, buying private label or premium brands).

As adoption of the network has grown, the use of these types of knowledge systems have broken out from the realm of business and regulatory regimes and become increasingly common attributes of mainstream consumer web applications. For instance, Amazon’s recommendation engine is familiar to most users of the e-commerce site, and the internet radio service Pandora grew out of the Music Genome Project which seeks to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level” by labeling artists, songs and albums with any number among hundreds of qualities that are construed to circumscribe the universe of possible musical ‘genes’. Apple’s iTunes Genius software works in much the same way, and in both cases the ‘individuality’ of each user can be reduced to their characteristics (the musical tastes that they input into the system) and their actions (their critical response to songs that Pandora and Genius deduce the individual should like, according to the algorithm).

Social Network Sites like Facebook have considerably widened the field of individuation of your network identity over more specialized services like Amazon or Pandora. On Facebook your individuality is determined by the characteristics that you enter into the system (your favorite bands, your profile picture, your networks) and especially the actions you take within the network: the friends you request and accept, the fan pages you follow, the status updates you post, the links that you share. All of these characteristics and actions individuate you on the network, and secure your identity as unique, as different than others (indeed, different than the twelve other people on the network who share your name, but not your identity). They are also increasingly public.

So, what’s new about this? Identity and reputation have always been defined by given characteristics and a track-record of actions taken. Perhaps what is new is the shelf-life of those actions, and the granularity with which individuals can be differentiated thanks to information technology. If all of the siloed and separated stores of an individual’s network identity were to be pooled and integrated, which is what it appears that Facebook Connect and other projects aim to accomplish, then an individual’s network identity could persist across every service under the sun.

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Filed under: Identity, Network Society
Posted by: Richard
On: Monday, August 24th