Tubes and news and citizens

This is a venture worth watching - not because it's the soc med wundermaschine that Big Journalism's grave orators would have you think, but because it's probably very much less than the sum of its parts.

But we'll see.

The proposition is as simple as it's flawed - and that, the last bit, is a shame. The first bit should be its strength. Its simplicity. That ... and the habit in some parts of the world of uploading video of every life-twitch onto a video-sharing website.

Like its YouTube blog intro says - and I've no reason to doubt it - the upload/realtime ratio of the world's biggest video-sharing site is around 1440:1 ... that's to say, people pipe around 24 hours of pictures - good, bad, pants and stolen - up to the Google servers every minute.

Sounds a lot - except when you consider the individual experience/realtime ratio is somewhere around 6,000,000,000:1 ... most of it taking place in parts of the world that are relatively or totally free of the uploading habit.

And that much of the material uploaded isn't original in any way.

Nevertheless, wisecrowd theory predicts there must be something of value in all these digits standing rigidly to attention in silicon arrays around the world. Indeed, it predicts that the value of the total must exceed that which any individual is capable of producing. Even when it comes to something like news.

Yeah, OK, mebbe.

On the other hand, 'The Caprice of Crowds' - the counter theory we all know is true but wish wasn't - suggests otherwise.

It also suggests that there are big, big problems facing something like Citizen Tube if it aspires to be more than yet another random waft in the information fog.

Actually, I wish Citizen Tube well - it's not a million miles from being an essential component in the 'continuum of news' I spoke about at the BBC College of Journalism/LSE 'Value of Journalism' conference on 11 June.

It's just that if it's going to do anything to be part of that continuum from Big Journalism - with its grand narratives and ability to convene people in their millions - on the one hand and personal access to an individual news landscape on the other, then it'll have to amount to much more than a self-certified, random collection of recorded human experience.

Significance and consistency

Traditionally, journalism has aimed to report on matters of significance and to do so with something approaching consistency. It hasn't always delivered and some of its failures have been and are egregious.

But in much the same way that our failure to be eternally tolerant or good citizens doesn't invalidate those aspirations, journalists' and journalism's aspirations tend to drive them towards the good rather than bad end of things.

Citizen Tube's aspirations are sound, too - especially its focus on 'non-traditional sources'. But it will have to show users - who will, presumably, include news organisations - that its 'non-traditional sources' extend beyond the metropolitan, rich, northern hemisphere - and that an air crash in Bangladesh will be there, and findable, as assuredly as one in the Hudson.

Gotcha

One of the most depressing features of the way in which video-sharing sites have distinguished themselves in what might be called 'political coverage' is the over-supply of 'gotchas'.

The moment the candidate loses his/her cool; the unguarded comment caught on tape; the off-the-record moment going on-the-record via the mobile phone of someone not bound by such niceties.

Citizen Tube is already accenting 'gotcha' videos - will they improve the way we do our politics? Or add to the infective myths that make proper political debate and argument near impossible?

Lenses and leverage

One of the weaknesses of Big Journalism - one of the moments when the significance and consistency aspiration fails - is its tendency to build and then overload bandwagons.

Journalists - in spite of their posturing and denials - are herd animals. Conventional wisdom - the unchallenged beliefs in a story - is more valuable than real wisdom.

Citizen Tube would do a great service if it were able to break this habit - but all the evidence suggests that it will make it worse.

Look at the trending topics on Twitter or the, often inexplicable, differences between the number of views of apparently similar videos on YouTube and you get some sense of the extraordinary power of web mobbing. And its irrationality.

And then the other boring stuff like ... verification?

A quick glance over Citizen Tube's offers over the past few days is not too reassuring. Watching the videos and reading their blurbs raises more questions than it answers.

Who uploaded this? What was the motive? What AREN'T we seeing? Is this what the uploader says it is ... or what he/she would like it to be?

And that's assuming we're not watching a straightforward hoax.

Citizen Tube doesn't tackle these questions or anxieties - to be fair, it doesn't claim to. But that's part of the problem.

Yes, both citizens and their journalists need some way of bringing this particular kind of personal news into the news continuum. And Citizen Tube isn't too bad a first stab.

But, at the moment, it falls way short and demonstrates at the same time the essential weaknesses in unstructured networks that aim to provide 'news'. And it adds to that regret some of us have that Big Journalism just never got the web when it was really important that it did.

And that the world of 'personal journalism' is - for the time being at least - failing to deliver what can reasonably be called journalism as assuredly as Big Journalism is failing to understand or adapt to the personal.