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"Wired World, Wired Learning: The Serf Surfs"

NetMedia Conference
July 1, 1999
London

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The digital revolution has provided us with a transformational technology. This new online world differs from the 1970's global community -- the one convened best by television -- in important ways that are just beginning to be understood.. Unlike television, the Net is precision-linked, interactive and constant. It defies our old ideas of space and time. It has inspired a different kind of literacy, new modes of communication and learning.

There is an old Czech proverb about fire: "It is a good servant, but a bad master." This is true of the Internet as well. Learning how to use it properly is especially important to the journalist. As Stephen Isaacs, co-founder of the Center for New Media at Columbia University, points out in the Spring 1999 Nieman Reports: "Those new tools with the 4.0's and 5.1's and 2.0's dragging along behind their names are already wielding influence far beyond the algorithms that drive them. They are already changing the traditional definitions of news, of reporting, even of thinking. The fact that the House of Representatives chose to release the report of the Independent Prosecutor (in the Whitewater/Monica Lewinsky case) on the World Wide Web signaled that we weren't kidding around any longer. The new era was now underway."

Perhaps the most important difference between Old Media (television, radio, print) and the Net is the fundamentally different way they engage the user. Old Media are like an old-fashioned European high school teacher. A friend of ours, a high school student in Slovakia who is a gifted pianist, lamented the other day that he had to give up practicing the piano because he had to memorize a daunting number of books in order to be admitted into the local university. In old-style European education, a book or a teacher is the authoritative source of knowledge. The teacher, or the textbook, is inviolate. Each has all the information the student needs, the canons of truth. The student must memorize what is presented by these books and teachers. Students are not supposed to inject their own creative ideas into the school environment; they are simply supposed to take in the given facts and arguments.

So it is with most television, radio and print. It may be far more entertaining and emotionally engaging than a stuffy professor, but Old Media still offer typically a top-down, autocratic, one-way communication of a fixed body of material. (Even much talk radio is autocratic, because the typical radio show host acts as a gatekeeper, screening the comments in advance and then praising or denigrating the caller's ideas.) On the Internet, a more democratic relationship is created. The user is as important as the provider. The serf surfs the World Wide Web and has a new relationship to the elite world.

The information itself ("content") has a different status, too. There are no incentives for the user to master a large number of static facts, but rather to master the fact-finding process. This idea, built on the expectation of constant change, assumes that facts themselves have more power if they are useful, and the facts that are useful this minute are not always the facts that will be useful tomorrow.

Time, traditionally the journalist's nemesis, loses its authority on the Net. A constant deadline is no deadline at all. Since there is no intrinsic production cycle or appointment with viewers, journalists and other providers can take whatever time is necessary to establish their content before posting it. Unfortunately, the present culture of journalism on the Net fails to take advantage of this reality. Still caught up in the outmoded "scoop" culture of 100 years ago, when newspapers updated screaming headlines in order to compete with each other's street corner sales, Net journalists take even less time to check their stories than they did in the Old Media. But guess what? The audience doesn't notice who got the scoop first. It's only a journalism peer thing. Unless it's news that moves financial markets, or has some other unusual triggering quality built into its subject matter, the story's "first-ness" is of minimal market value in this new media landscape. Yet this rush to throw everything online, including stories that aren't ready for publication in the Old Media, is undermining the credibility of journalists everywhere.

In fact, we journalists have been remarkably old-fashioned and thoughtless in general about our approach to the Internet. We have simply transferred our old approach to the news -- chasing the nearest incremental tidbit, regardless of its real importance over time, at the expense of more useful analysis which requires a broader range of vision.

Now, at least, we have the kind of news hole that allows thorough treatment. The user can keep interested by choosing which tunnels of the website to explore. Instead of offering depth, online journalists offer change; news is only what is "new." But the Net user already can activate her own change -- by linking very precisely to something else "new." So "news" needs to offer something else, something beyond just what is "new."

In the Old Media, content has a short shelf life. Time by necessity wipes out what we have seen on television, heard on radio, or thrown away with yesterday's newspaper. But the Net doesn't require that content be shoved aside to make way for what is new. There is room for both at once. The Annenberg Washington Program lives online today four years after it closed, thanks to Northwestern University's willingness to continue providing server space. No one is managing it; it is simply a fixed-content, Internet-accessible library of our work over the years as Annenberg fellows. (Check it out: http://www.annenberg.northwestern.edu/.)

The Net provides a seemingly bottomless storage pit. This means there is virtually no spatial limit to the amount of explanation or documentation that can be assembled. The journalist no longer has the excuse that there wasn't room in her 2-minute television report or 12-inch story for that quote or clarification.. The wired world not only can store endless information bits, but it can organize them instantly into a dazzling variety of content-driven patterns. Content is easy to archive and easy to retrieve (after one has experimented a bit and learned how to navigate the Web).

If time and space are conquered on the Net (as long as the servers aren't overwhelmed), so is place. The Internet can take what is supremely local, small, personal and individual and give it unnatural prominence on a global platform. Just as users and providers are equalized, so is content itself. The Internet, a medium which offers more chances for unfiltered reality to emerge for all seekers than has ever been available before -- more original documents, pictures, sound and video clips, and commentaries, instantly available, to anyone -- is also making it harder to separate fact from fiction. The lack of filters makes content on the Net seem more authentic. But this is largely an illusion.

Old Media journalists constantly create a hierarchy of importance (however inanely it is selected) for the content they deliver, by its sequential presentation (first or last) and its volume (a brief TV spot or a nightly special). In the World Wide Web, no subject matter inherently jumps out at you as occupying "higher ground," because you, the user, are initiating the selection process. (Brands, usually created in the Old Media, can, however, create value status on the Internet, as do individual websites and subscription online news delivery services.) Aside from effectively branded space, the Net is the ultimate "level playing field," treating all information equally. Pseudo-facts with no intrinsic significance become equal in importance on the Net to news that really matters to peoples' lives.

In an ideal educational exchange, one would have access both to the "canon" of historical facts and the transforming perspectives of fresh material. The Internet not only wipes out the "voices of authority" or other gatekeepers in control of the pipeline of information, but it returns the user to a nonlinear, synthetic, and interactive mode of learning common to ancient oral storytelling, as Robert K. Logan describes in The Fifth Language (Toronto: Stoddart, 1995). Web pages using hypertext links confound the fixed, linear learning process forced by, for example, a typical news story in the Old Media.

Jean Piaget's education research, which found that students learn more when they have an opportunity to choose what and when they study, underscores the Net's value as an educational tool. But critical thinking -- evaluative editing -- becomes even more vital for the user. Media literacy, the ability to judge what is worth believing and using in order to create meaning, becomes an even more vital skill in the Net universe. And while virtually everyone can be a journalist or teacher now, thanks to the instant resources of the Net, its overwhelming scope makes the professional tour guide more valuable. We need journalists, teachers and other leaders more than ever, to help us sort out dispassionately the real from the false, the meaningful and relevant from the merely amusing.

Instead of simply importing our bad habits and narrow line of vision into this new Internet medium, journalists can use the technology's special opportunities to improve knowledge and, by extension, the quality of policymaking in our democratic societies. Instead of being rumor roosters, crowing first, today's best Net journalists are map-makers, showing everyone how to discover what they need to know. Like the best teachers, they enable people to teach themselves. Ideally, they continue the ethical goals of impartiality, comprehensiveness and fairness. The best maps include a full array of alternative routes, respecting a diversity of ideas.

At PBS's Democracy Project, we experimented with just such a model. I call it "resource journalism," a multimedia approach that works to take advantage of the Net's unique characteristics.

We developed this project in 1997 out of necessity. We recognized that we couldn't expect stations to carry the daily multiple congressional hearings on campaign finance scandals, because they went on all day, every day, for six months. It did not make sense to throw out "Sesame Street" and all the other daytime PBS programming for these sometimes simultaneous, often pointless hearings. Yet the hearings cast a spotlight on something important about American political life and provided an opportunity to look at the choices citizens have to organize politics differently. We wanted to offer something of value, something accessible to today's busy citizen.

So what media content would be of most value to the educated PBS audience? We decided to offer a multimedia resource that married the impact of television with the qualities of the Internet. We created a $1 million weekly television series and website called "Follow the Money," featuring a holistic approach to the entire subject. In addition to offering televised and Web highlights of the week's financial scandal news and hearings, we offered news in both media about reform options, context (historic mini-documentaries, humor, field reports on how people around the country thought about all of this) and interactivity. Because we were very poor, we could not offer interactivity in real time. But a discussion "question of the week" posed by the television and Web hosts effectively generated online citizen responses that were shared with other online visitors and also selected for use on the television show that followed.

We adopted for our website the Benton Foundation's campaign reform game, "Destination Democracy," which navigated online visitors through the likely consequences of each reform option. And we offered HTML click-through access to the websites of groups actively working on all aspects of the campaign finance crisis. Thus, a frustrated citizen could actually join any number of various lobbying groups on the spot, through our Web portal.

The result? Our television program lacked the linear cohesiveness of Old Media storytelling, because it jumped around trying to do many things in one half hour each week. The subject was not gripping enough to draw much attention from television stations, and thus some important ones shrugged it off into terrible time slots. But "Follow the Money" created a valuable prototype; it provided a far more comprehensive resource about money and politics than any television series alone, or any orphan website. And while there was no money at all to publicize this experiment -- which means, unfortunately, that the press who write about television also did not pick up on it -- "Follow the Money" found a core audience through Internet listservs from organizations linked to our website. Our audiences were actively engaged -- a desirable audience model for the niched media landscape. We had compliments from across the ideological spectrum: the conservative Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute as well as the liberal Common Cause. Ordinary citizens who don't align themselves with any particular ideological camp emailed us to say they liked the efforts at fairness and comprehensiveness. They liked the pairing of news about a problem with news about a range of solutions. And they loved the Net doors we opened for people to put themselves into the action.

These then, are some of the opportunities offered by the Wired World. I hope that teachers will help everyone become more Net literate, upgrading our critical analysis skills to match the challenge of all that random content. And I hope other content providers will map the way to genuine citizen empowerment. If you don't use the Net creatively, who will?