Manchester_09 by Killmore

Since the first Liveblog, in Sept of last year I’ve been thinking about how they could help perk up Ireland’s sleepy big media. At heart, each medium speaks to its audience with a different tone. But until the last 10 years, what they all had in common was the broadcast model- ie, they spoke and we listened. When it comes to reporting on our communities and our nation, this reduced voters from being a participator in our own society to being spectators- members of an audience do not become players on the stage.

The internet has handed us a chance to meaningfully participate in the national conversation again. But we’ve had some difficulty in finding the right forms to put our contributions in. It can be helpful if we make comparisons with different internet media and compare them to the familiar media we’ve been used to.

Blogs can be imagined as miniature newspapers, penned by one person or many. If we accept this model, the comments on each thread become like the letters to the editor. Feedback is encouraged but commentators are, in most blog templates, always secondary to the main author’s contribution.

Twitter and Facebook status posts most resemble the radio- intimate, immediate, distributed snippets of everyday life peppered with dramatic events. They’re great for reporting, but like a radio journalist in a field where aliens have crash landed, they don’t allow for much more.

To my surprise (and don’t forget I’ve only been doing them for seven months) the Liveblogs have most in common with the medium they owe most of their existence to- Television.

Liveblogging mirrors television’s sense of a shared here and now. What price a PVR if timeshifting locks you out of the conversation? Both require a mass audience, though the definition of ‘mass’ in blogging terms is orders of magnitude smaller than TV. A liveblog by a handful of people can be amusing, but it can’t create the unique mirrorball effect of seeing an event simultaneously from all angles.

They mirror television, as I say, but mirrors also invert what they show. Where television is the most passive of media, liveblogging is the most aggressively participatory. Where television requires huge capital investment in equipment, liveblogging is possible from a €9 mobile phone. I know, because that’s what I used when moderating part of the Fine Gael Ard Feis Liveblog, while at the zoo with my family. Anyone who’s been excitedly shown tumbling baby orang-outangs by a 2 year old will know that it doesn’t leave much time for fiddling with complicated equipment.

Perhaps the most significant difference is the way stories and issues rise and fall.

On television, news is presented as an emotional event- the combination of strong pictures and stentorian music would be familiar techniques to Leni Reifenstahl. Stories that generate strong emotions get lots of coverage. Thus Fear gives us swine flu, Awe gives us extreme weather, Horror and Pity give us lone gunman massacres and missing children.

This produces a duel problem if you look to your TV news to inform you. Because emotions fade, television news demands something new to happen (which is to say, new pictures) or it loses interest. Stories slide down a news agenda as the flare of emotion which drove them fades. The corollary of this is that issues and stories which are of equal or greater significance are ignored because they don’t easily provoke an emotional response.

Who, in March 2008, could have persuaded a TV newsroom to lead with the causes and consequences of sub-prime derivative securities? It was impossible, despite the potential impact on the future of the audience’s employment and income. There was no way it could be formulated as a story, because (as Wikipedia says Gertrude Stein said of the city of Oakland) there was no there, there. No pictures, no recognisable heroes or villains. Nothing but a giant hole big enough for capitalism to fall into.

On television, therefore, stories start big, with a flare of strong emotion, and then dwindle away over a few hours or days.

On Twitter which, allied to the humble hashtag, fuels feeds and staffs a liveblog, stories start small. But if the ideas driving a story are compelling and clearly expressed they will spread. Held together by the tenuous link of ending messages with #picturegate, comment on the Irish state’s reaction to satire became first a national, then an international and then the leading national story. Journalists were hitting refresh on Twitter Search and then reporting what they found as breaking news. It wasn’t just Irish journalists. As #picturegate stayed on the international Twitter Search front page, curious journalists from the world over clicked through to find a compelling story of official repression of free speech in a country urgently in need of open debate.

It was irresistible. And it was that Twitter factor which drove the story to defy the laws of physics- It got bigger as time went on.

The story spread because at its heart #picturegate represented a clash of ideas- between authoritarianism on the one hand and freedom on the other. And where TV news relies on powerful, but short-lived blasts of emotion to grab attention blogging, Twittering and liveblogging all rely on strong ideas, clearly expressed. If there is one thing history shows, it is that a stong idea, clearly expressed doesn’t fade over time. And, right now in Ireland, we have urgent need for clearly expressed ideas from all comers.

About 140 characters ought to do it.