Uber Multitaskers and digital citizenship

Seldom do you ever feel more like a journalist than when you cover a protest. The semi-chaotic situation, the anger, the people's excitement and concern, and the constant moving and chanting all give you a certain adrenaline rush that makes you alert of even the smallest of details.

Faced with a crowd of probably a couple thousand, you start making decisions on what is more important, what quotes should be written down, who should be interviewed. You enter what I call "the journalist mode," analyzing in a matter of seconds what information deserves to be reported and what media suits it best. As with "arachnid" sharpness and sensibility, we enter into an "alpha" mode in which we try to look for the article and its angle in everything that happens around us.

As a print journalist-to-be, I always focus on what people say and do, going from the most general to the specifics. I know I will have to "paint" the scene to readers who were not there to experience the sentiments and emotions of the protest. They didn't hear the shouting or see the signs. They may have seen pictures but, in general, they won't have enough context to understand what those pictures really say. That is the work of print journalists--to give context, to explain, to spell out and make readers visualize and experiment what happened.

Retrieved from roystoncartoons.com
by Royston Robertson,  2009.

But journalism has changed dramatically, as I could experience first-hand today during the CPS School Closings protest at Daley Plaza and the march that came after. We were all there: print, broadcast, digital, radio, photo. We were all there. But what used to be a divide between the different medias and their particular ways of getting the information out, became a literal depiction of the word "convergence."

Yes, print journalists were there, but they were also tweeting and uploading videos live from the protest to the Internet. Yes, broadcast journalists were there, but they were also dictating stories to their newsrooms. Stories that would be, almost instantly, published in a written format in the network's web site. Photojournalists were there, but they were also online. And pretty much everyone was live-tweeting. If I didn't hear something Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said, I was sure to get it in a tweet a minute after. If I couldn't get the official headcount, police were most likely to publish it half an hour after the protesters dispersed. There were, or are, no boundaries to information.

If before journalism had branches that marked the way news were processed and published, now all the media to process and publish this information has converged, requiring all aspiring journalists to be ready to print, broadcast, live tweet, photograph and what not, everything that happens. We are required to be the uber multitaskers.

But why do we do this? Why have journalists transcended the boundaries of their own realms to become a "little bit of everything"? What has compelled us to move across platforms?

Well, there are many answers to those questions but I think they sum up to the simple fact that people (citizens, our audiences) are moving across different platforms, crossing limits and being empowered by new technologies that give them the opportunity to engage more and more effectively. They are not only citizens of a country, they are citizens of the web.

During the protest, for example, journalists' tweets only accounted for a minority of all the tweets regarding the march and the school closings, the majority were done by protesters and activists themselves. And it doesn't end there, it were precisely these community members, the audience, the "laymen and women" who by retweeting, commending or commenting on journalists' articles and tweets, empowered the journalists and got the word out.

"Power to the People," retrieved from fat.spreadshirt.com

The notion that technology has the potential, the power to foster and propel change is a complex but unavoidable reality. Not only, as the Knight Foundation suggested in its study on Digital Citizenship, does technology can bring community together to build relations for the benefit of the community, but also, it has the tremendous power to get words, ideas, plans, etc. out and, by doing so, engaging communities even further in democracy, in local politics and economics, and ultimately, in the creation of their own future.

I cannot help but think about the Arab Spring when pondering the capacity of technology to empower people, bringing them together to provoke change. Even in less grandiose enterprises, social media and the digital world have helped move the masses--think about elections, for example. Yes, we are moving because the people are moving, because it no longer suffices to get events into paper or tv.



It is indeed a demanding yet exciting time to be a journalist.

Retrieved from "Drowning in Digital Democracy: Part I" by J. C. Caruso
http://blog.marylhurst.edu/blog/2013/03/19/drowning-in-digital-democracy-part-i/