The above interview is with Curtis Brown about his article (written with Diana Allan) The Mavi Marmara at the Frontlines of Web 2.0 in the Autumn 2010 edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies. It looks critically of what many in the blogosphere are doing, including us here at Mondoweiss, and says that social media and blogs are not necessarily influencing the discourse and coverage of more mainstream media outlets as much as we might hope. From the interview:
Well, one of the ideas that my co-author and I were critiquing, or examining with a certain amount of skepticism, is the idea that social media is intrinsically leveling. To take one particularly salient example for the present case is the idea that because video is cheap to produce and free to distribute via You Tube that, therefore, grassroots use of video clips by media activists can compete on a level playing field against a state owned PR apparatus with a well oiled machine and influential lobby.
The videos of the Mavi Marmara attack, edited by the IDF, were promoted by Israeli spokespeople and commentators. They enjoyed almost, kind of, incessant reruns on American news and cable stations. They existed against a background machinery of promotion. The footage of activists and independent journalists and so on, you could say then, was promoted by progressive independent media, by Democracy Now and so on.
So, in other words, traditional preexisting networks of influence and material resources determine to a great extent the reach and impact of social media. And when large vested interests are involved, viral phenomenon can rock the boat but they are not going to capsize it.
Even more interesting is the idea that social media doesn’t actually enter the traditional media, but rather runs parallel to it. Again from the interview:
We could take, for example, Max Blumenthal. He is an excellent independent journalist who works in the blogosphere and on twitter. He did force a few Israeli retractions with regards to the flotilla attack. These then were reported by Robert Mackey’s blog in the New York Times and this, Blumenthal claimed and other commentators claimed, was a major breakthrough for pro-Palestinian, grassroots media activism.
But what gets lost there is that Mackey’s blog is almost entirely devoted to meta commentary about what goes on in the new media. It’s viral videos, mashups, internet memes. So that an important story about the official Israeli narrative being contradicted or undermined, or even disproved in some cases, that sits side by side with the story about the “Bed Intruder Rant” being turned into a music video through Auto-Tune and then it becomes a viral on You Tube.
Neither of these stories, then, migrate to the news pages or the print edition of the New York Times. In other words, you could say that what goes on in social media has become a circumscribed arena within the mainstream press. It is something that is reported on for an enthusiastic sub audience that is interested in this, the way that sports, technology news, and pop news are reported. It has become an arena in itself.
One of the things that we say in this paper, one of the ideas that we suggest, is that if the Mohammed al-Dura video were coming out now in this media climate, rather than a decade ago, that it might rip through the blogosphere and onto Robert Mackey’s desk and not get noticed by the news pages.
Not sure what I think about this quite yet (I think the characterization of Mackey’s work at the Times, and its news function, is incorrect for one), but I’ll wait to comment once I’ve read their full piece. In the meantime, certainly something to think about.
