Japan - Is the web a private or a public matter?

I was at a Media conference last week. A Journalism Prof dissed Twitter all night long. How could anyone cover a story in 140 characters? In the last 2 months in Canada we have had a regulatory fight - in essence the web is being seen as another entertainment channel where the most important part of the equation is how much we should all pay for watching movies.

I think that this idea - that the social web is trivial and just about fun is wrong and dangerous. I think that its true importance has to be put on the table politically.

Japan nails this issue for me.

Once again, as a huge story breaks, many of us have found that Social Media has given us a better sense of the event than the traditional news POV.

Big news just cannot get at the scope of such an event or touch its immediacy.

Some like the BBC and Al Jazeera are finding a good way of covering such a story - which is to act as an aggregator. They make it easy - you got their their site - I use Livestation as a portal.

Some like NPR are finding out that their one man news platform - Andy Carvin - who is personally aggregating offers a good view as well. Andy and his readers tend to use Tweetdeck

So what are the lessons for the rest of us?

1. If you are in media - curating and aggregating is the way that breaking news will be covered. So what does that imply? It implies a new model for news. At the centre aggregation and then context setting. For you no longer have to do a 90 second view of an event. You can cover the event 24/7 as see what pattern emerges - while you do this - as the pattern becomes visible - you add context. We can start to get out of the sound bite perspective. This will also cost you a lot less to do and improve your coverage. This works on all scales. If you were my local paper or my local CBC station on tiny PEI - population 140,000 - you could offer a massive range of stories - from ALL the sport every game on the Island - to a breaking weather event this way. Maybe for less money than the current system that can only cover 20 stories a day. The same is true for world news as we are finding out now. news will get better and better the more we go down this road. We will all be more informed and we will indeed all become part of the story. I was riveted by a Skype interview from the BBC in London with a woman stuck in her apartment in Tokyo - what was going on was represented in the most human and direct way. I was there. Old news is trivial when compared with this!
2. If you are in the crisis business - In spite of all the mess in Japan now - imagine how much harder the rescue efforts would be without social media? With good aggregation and intelligent filters it will be possible to get a handle on what is going on in a much better way. Again this works at all scales. Back to my little place PEI. We have been having very bad weather and road conditions recently. The mainstream media are starting to do a good job at aggregating the reports of the citizens. The result is that we all know so much more and in real time. We will all get through bad times better. I bet that in the years to come much of the story will be about how social media saved many lives.
3. If you are in a crisis - Imagine being in a badly hit place in Japan and not having a working cell phone versus having one - Could be life and death for you. Imagine if you are at your office in Tokyo and your family are on the coast. How are you going to find out if they are OK? I recall in the early days of Social Media looking for my lost daughter among the pictures of the dead - she was OK thank God! so look ahead and think about how your access to thew web is governed now. Will many people be excluded because they cannot afford to pay? Will the system be too vulnerable to survive a big problem? Is the system only about the needs of the IP's or is there a larger context here?
4. If you have a service or a product to sell - How can you not use this avenue for listening and responding. Gone are the days where you could wait for formal research. Gone are the days when you asked the questions. Now you listen and you see the patterns. Tools like Darwin help a lot here. Will you be held hostage too by the IPs? Will the IP's be able to levy any kind of tax they want on your business? Can they exclude you?

The biggest lesson then for me is that the web and social media are not just toys where I watch movies, hear songs or play games. The web and social media is now the most important part of any society's social infrastructure.

This implies that it cannot be regulated as merely another entertainment channel. It has profound public value that has to be put first.

Societies that have a healthy and widely used and easily accessed web and social media system - will be better informed and more resilient in the shocks that are inevitable in our future.

The private interests of all have to be subsumed to the public good.