unmediated: Citizens' media in action.

September 09, 2004

Citizens' media in action.

In the midst of last week's RNC-related media activities, I forgot to post something about the most unmediated of them all - the story of how the arrest of Josh Kinberg spread through the blogosphere.

On the Saturday before the convention started, Joshua Kinberg was arrested while demonstrating his BikesAgainstBush chalk-writer project in an interview with MSNBC. Because there was precedent for expressing political speech in chalk the reasons for his arrest were questionable. It seemed to be a story that should be public. I spoke to people I knew at major media outlets but none of them were in a position to cover the story. So I did it myself. Not as a journalist or a professional media maker but as a citizen.

So I used my blog, an alternative media news site, and p2p file sharing to help share the news of Josh's arrest and, in the process, found that citizens' media could help give a story greater impact than if it were covered in traditional media alone.

On August 28th, Josh Kinberg is arrested and his bicycle confiscated under questionable circumstances a day before the RNC actually started. Fortunately, Josh's advisor on the project, Yury Gitman is there to document it all with his camcorder. He captures the video to his laptop and puts it online as an MPEG4 clip that he emails out to friends.

I watch the clip, then make a torrent of it which I upload to DV Guide. After calling Yury to clear up some details, I set to writing a short article describing the arrest and post the article to indymedia. I email a link to the article to a few of my friends, fire up my newsreader and wait.

Within six hours, the indymedia post is linked on Boing Boing and Slashdot. Within 24 hours, Joi Ito and Jason Kottke have picked it up (with Jason even "re-seeding" the clip as a d/l on his site). By the time Monday rolls around, DV Guide has registered over 4500 completed downloads and 400 seeders. Josh's story is being covered by media outlets (other than MSNBC) and CNN is asking Yury if they can use the torrent footage in their broadcast (Guess they didn't understand the Creative Commons thing.)

I haven't had time to really think about what any of this means, but I did jot down a few ideas that I should probably expand upon at some later time (sorry if I ramble):

Trusted sources matter. A post to indymedia or kottke or slashdot or boingboing means a lot more than a post to my personal blog -- if for no other reason than access to the eyeballs. (But all of these sources started out as simple personal/citizens media projects themselves. They built their audiences up through a simple recipe of trust, respect, and sincerity -- you know, standard Shirky+Corante stuff.) Some nodes will always be more important than others, and that's a good thing.

Once posted on a site with a good number of eyeballs (I sound like ESR), the community will push it up (to more popular blogs) without your intervention if they feel the story is important enough.

Compelling media matters. When artist Steve Kurtz was arrested back in May (a similar case with even worse possible consequences), it took a good 4-7 days before you saw the story spread through most of the blogosphere. In Josh's case, the immediacy of the RNC was a definite factor, but I like to speculate that it was the existence of compelling video that helped the story spread so quickly. (Besides, there were plenty of other questionable arrests that weekend.)

Great citizens media hubs already exist (but they tend to have lots of political associations that make them unattractive to some folks. The newer citizens' media projects should study and learn from them. (indymedia was effective.)

Citizens media and major media can compliment each other just fine.

Posted by yatta at 06:02 AM