I often wonder about whether the new technologies that we have available to us improve anything or if we just keep creating things to create them. Here are some examples: one, two and three.
I came across the project below and for the first time in a long time thought that the approach was innovative and could be employed to a wide variety of topics relevant to state repression: http://labs.aljazeera.net/warongaza/
Are we at the dawn of a new age though? Perhaps. Still have some questions to answer: 1) is the data that we receive from social media any more accurate than our traditional sources, 2) are there incentives for people to tell stories in social media that differ from other sources (what does instagram get us that Reuters does not?), 3) is more information always better information, 4) are the characteristics of the events of interest (who, what, when, where and why) covered with the same level of effectiveness as NGO & government reports or even the media, and 5) who is tracking all the different sources to see what is/what is not being covered?
I don't want to be one of those people that talks about what things used to be like but at least when I looked at a newspaper I had some sense that there was an actual person somewhere at the newspaper or newswire that would take responsibility for what was printed or at least walk me through what happened that resulted in a story. This is also the case with regard to NGO reports but this is seldom the case with government reports and I'm starting the think that this is also the case for social media. How should we use the new technology when we don't know who is behind it? Also where are the huge depositories that are compiling all these things (outside of the NSA of course) so that we could start to make some of the comparisons across social media?
Are we at the dawn of a new age though? Perhaps. Still have some questions to answer: 1) is the data that we receive from social media any more accurate than our traditional sources, 2) are there incentives for people to tell stories in social media that differ from other sources (what does instagram get us that Reuters does not?), 3) is more information always better information, 4) are the characteristics of the events of interest (who, what, when, where and why) covered with the same level of effectiveness as NGO & government reports or even the media, and 5) who is tracking all the different sources to see what is/what is not being covered?
I don't want to be one of those people that talks about what things used to be like but at least when I looked at a newspaper I had some sense that there was an actual person somewhere at the newspaper or newswire that would take responsibility for what was printed or at least walk me through what happened that resulted in a story. This is also the case with regard to NGO reports but this is seldom the case with government reports and I'm starting the think that this is also the case for social media. How should we use the new technology when we don't know who is behind it? Also where are the huge depositories that are compiling all these things (outside of the NSA of course) so that we could start to make some of the comparisons across social media?
Some action: Well, we need a contention and social media panel/roundtable at every national meeting until we get caught up. I'm on a panel at ISA on Thursday at 4pm with friends Steve Saideman and Daniel Drezner among others to have part of this conversation (in "De-Mystifying Twitter for Scholars of Comparative and International Politics"). This is only the tip of the iceberg though. We need to take this show on the road and it needs to get bigger. The need is clear. More of this information is becoming available and more people are starting to use it in their research. There either needs to be a Social Media section of APSA, Midwest and ISA or, more broadly, a section on Data. Political Methodology takes us part of the way but not completely there - especially recognizing that data generation is a different animal and artform from data analysis. Once I read the Symposium on Data Collection and Collaboration in PS, I started to have this idea. Now,
RSS Feed
