Twitter, Citizen News, and Another Man’s Shoes

Two things came across my RSS feeds today that show how technology is impacting our information environment. First, YouTube has added a News Manager to promote Citizen News content. Meet Olivia:

Second was a blog entry by CNET’s Dan Farber on Twitter as a viable means of spreading information.

I am simultaneously excited by the prospects of such a wide range of information and the complications of it. How do I find the interesting and important stuff? (Certainly not always the same thing. Think Mentos and Diet Coke.) How do I manage the information flows that meet the interesting or important criteria? And a perhaps cautionary concern (or call it cynical) of how I can perform due diligence on all this? How do I determine quickly enough to be useful what is reliable, objective, white-washed, agenda-laden, mean-spirited, or just plain wrong? We see errors enough in the official reporting establishments that suggest this is no easy task (like the go-to CNN footage showing Chinese soldiers in Tibet that turned out to be Nepalese soldiers–oops).

There are continually emerging ways of monitoring information–from RSS feeds, feed consolidators, listservs, trolling MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and, or course, just hearing about things from friends. For me, the challenge is to make sure that I am not just keeping up with information, but trying to achieve a balance in perspective. (My husband John reads the front pages of 30 foreign language papers for this, when he is not actually visiting the places he’s curious about. He reads faster than i do.)

While I frequently wonder how these bloggers, emailers, and YouTubers know so many interesting people, I remind myself that generally our sources are self-selected, and therefore make it unlikely that we get opinions from the “other side” whatever that might be. With the abundance of information, it becomes all the easier to reaffirm our own points of view. To give a nod to cognitive scientists, it really cuts down on the cognitive dissonance and that pesky discomfort that comes from uncertainty.

The challenge is to make sure that knowing all this stuff doesn’t make us so scared that we don’t want to know it. There are no shortage of advice from dignitaries such as Yogi Berra, Will Rogers, and St. Augustin about seeing things from another’s point of view. It turns out a lot of things are at stake, just ask the social and political scientists who spend time trying to resolve intergroup conflict.

The worst kinds of intractable conflict starts with fear in our own brains. The great thing about the new journalism is that it’s not linear; it comes at you from everywhere. A lot of people worry about this, but I think it’s a good thing. With luck, a bunch of stuff will sneak in our brains that we hardly notice and wedge us out of our comfort zone into seeing a bigger picture.