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Uncategorized: In profile: Profiles
Published on 11/03/07
by Zac Echola
Noah Barron posed this question to journalists at OJR the other day:
Should we use the self-reported details that people–most often young people–post on their own social networking sites for journalistic articles?
He even answers his own question:
As a reporter, there must be special caution with regards to behavior and statements made on the Web. The Internet is still a realm of pseudo-behavior, where the stealing of music files seems categorically different to some than the stealing of a CD from a retail store.
Let’s ignore the misconception that copyright infringement is stealing (when it is technically copying) for a second and focus Noah’s original argument: That journalists must use special caution when reporting on “pseudo-behavior.”
I touched a bit on keeping virtual personalities separate in my last post. Even though I tend to keep all of my profiles as open to the public as the application allows, I still focus my content on those networks to the audience on that network. I’m famous to 15 people with each of those applications, to turn Warhol’s phrase for my own purposes.
Sure, my mother-in-law, feeling snoopy, could sign up for a Facebook account and try to spy on me. For quite some time, employers searching the Internet for prospective employees has been all the rage in the news media. But, that doesn’t mean what I put on those networks isn’t me.
When you hang out with your more-apt-to-party friends and they convince you to get naked and run around your house while singing the National Anthem in falsetto, that’s a behavior you wouldn’t just up and do at grandma’s house or work. See, like advertising on the Internet, it’s all about context, baby! Simply because you feel comfortable swearing at your siblings, but not your parents, doesn’t necessarily mean swearing is “pseudo-behavior.”
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Which leads me to the second flaw in Barron’s hasty argument: That real world behavior is truthful.
Clearly, if that were true, we wouldn’t even need journalists, since politicians, business execs and every day crooks would all tell us the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Assuming real life behavior is more truthful than Internet behavior (which is highly debatable in and of itself), context still matters in both the acts of behaving and the acts of journalism. At the end of a day covering a story about a corrupt cop that steals from the elderly, does it matter if that cop also enjoys quick games of racquetball with his gay buddies? No. Or, at least, probably not.
It’s the journalists job to parse that information, regardless of its source.
Editor of OJR, Robert Niles, notes in the discussion:
Unfortunately, many of these people do not realize that these online personas *are* available to the world, and not just to their invited Myspace friends.
Which I suppose is a good point except for the simple fact that “young people’s ignorance” (his words, not mine) when it comes to the Internet being open to anybody, may actually be an inherent understanding of the Internet itself: Nobody sees everything. I don’t get why people have to keep repeating this: Attention is zero sum. If it’s not zero sum, it’s pretty damn close.
Niles reconciles this, intuitively:
Yet, at the same time, journalists need better new media literacy as well. We need to recognize that what one sees on many Myspace and Facebook profiles is just one, carefully edited yet often intentionally incomplete slice of a person’s true self. Often, these profiles are written to conform to what a person sees as his or her friends’ social expectation of that person, and not as a reflection of how that person sees himself or herself. A social networking profile is one source into a person’s being that needs to be balanced by the presence of other sources.
So to answer Barron’s question:
Be a damned journalist, for Christ’s sake. Gather sources, parse them, and try to find the truth.
The end. Or is it?
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Comments on In profile: Profiles
One Response
nederlandsk
12/03/07
In many ways I think that the Internet can provide a MORE accurate reflection of an individual than an interview with that individual could. After all, how many 22-year-olds can be at ease in an interview? A juggalo’s MySpace profile may be more reflaective of who a person wants to be than who they are, but then again, so is everything people put forward. What’s more, comments reveal a lot — that’s where you can see what people’s friends think about them, and, from there, discern even more information about an individual.
The idea that journalists must use caution when perusing MySpace for information for articles is a good one. But, as you mentioned, one would hope they would do that when pursuing any source.