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1/6Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1732603

M/C Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2010) - 'ambient'From TV to Twitter: How Ambient News Became Ambient Journalismhttp://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/220

Alfred Hermida

In a TED talk in June 2009, media scholar Clay Shirky cited the devastating earthquake that

struck the Sichuan province of China in May 2008 as an example of how media flows arechanging. He explained how the first reports of the quake came not from traditional news media,but from local residents who sent messages on QQ, Chinas largest social network, and onTwitter, the worlds most popular micro-blogging service. "As the quake was happening, thenews was reported," said Shirky.

This was neither a unique nor isolated incident. It has become commonplace for the peoplecaught up in the news to provide the first accounts, images and video of events unfolding aroundthem. Studies in participatory journalism suggest that professional journalists now share

jurisdiction over the news in the sense that citizens are participating in the observation,selection, filtering, distribution and interpretation of events. This paper argues that the ability ofcitizens to play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating

news and information (Bowman and Willis 9) means we need to reassess the meaning ofambient as applied to news and journalism.

Twitter has emerged as a key medium for news and information about major events, such asduring the earthquake in Chile in February 2010 (see, for example, Silverman; Dickinson). Thispaper discusses how social media technologies such as Twitter, which facilitate the immediatedissemination of digital fragments of news and information, are creating what I have describedas ambient journalism (Hermida). It approaches real-time, networked digital technologies asawareness systems that offer diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news andinformation in the periphery of a user's awareness.

Twitter shares some similarities with other forms of communication. Like the telephone, itfacilitates a real-time exchange of information. Like instant messaging, the information is sent inshort bursts. But it extends the affordances of previous modes of communication by combiningthese features in both a one-to-many and many-to-many framework that is public, archived andsearchable. Twitter allows a large number of users to communicate with each othersimultaneously in real-time, based on an asymmetrical relationship between friends andfollowers. The messages form social streams of connected data that provide value bothindividually and in aggregate.

News All Around

The term ambient has been used in journalism to describe the ubiquitous nature of news in

today's society. In their 2002 study, Hargreaves and Thomas said one of the defining features ofthe media landscape in the UK was the easy availability of news through a host of mediaplatforms, such as public billboards and mobile phones, and in spaces, such as trains andaircraft. News is, in a word, ambient, like the air we breathe, they concluded (44). Theavailability of news all around meant that citizens were able to maintain an awareness of whatwas taking place in the world as they went about their everyday activities.

One of the ways news has become ambient has been through the proliferation of displays inpublic places carrying 24-hour news channels or showing news headlines. In her book,AmbientTelevision, Anna McCarthy explored how television has become pervasive by extending outsidethe home and dominating public spaces, from the doctors waiting room to the bar. When we

search for TV in public places, we find a dense, ambient clutter of public audio-visualapparatuses, wrote McCarthy (13).

In some ways, the proliferation of news on digital platforms has intensified the presence ofambient news. In a March 2010 Pew Internet report, Purcell et al. found that in the digital era,news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on


2/6Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1732603

myriad devices (2). It seems that, if anything, digital technologies have increased the presenceof ambient news.

This approach to the term ambient is based on a twentieth century model of mass media.Traditional mass media, from newspapers through radio to television, are largely one-directional,impersonal one-to-many carriers of news and information (McQuail 55). The most palpablefeature of the mass media is to reach the many, and this affects the relationship between themedia and the audience.

Consequently, the news audience does not act for itself, but is acted upon (McQuail 57). It isassigned the role of consumer. The public is present in news as citizens who receive informationabout, and interpretation of, events from professional journalists. The public as the recipient ofinformation fits in with the concept of ambient news as news which is free at the point ofconsumption, available on demand and very often available in the background to peoples liveswithout them even looking (Hargreaves and Thomas 51).

To suggest that members of the audience are just empty receptacles to be filled with news is anoversimplification. For example, television viewers are not solely defined in terms ofspectatorship (see, for example, Ang). But audiences have, traditionally, been kept well outsidethe journalistic process, defined as the selecting, writing, editing, positioning, scheduling,repeating and otherwise massaging information to become news (Shoemaker et al. 73). Thisaudience is cast as the receiver, with virtually no sense of agency over the news process. As aresult, journalistic communication has evolved, largely, as a process of one-way, one-to-manytransmission of news and information to the public. The following section explores the shifttowards a more participatory media environment.

News as a Social Experience

The shift from an era of broadcast mass media to an era of networked digital media hasfundamentally altered flows of information. Non-linear, many-to-many digital communicationtechnologies have transferred the means of media production and dissemination into the handsof the public, and are rewriting the relationship between the audience and journalists. Where

there were once limited and cost-intensive channels for the distribution of content, there are nowa myriad of widely available digital channels.

Henry Jenkins has written about the emergence of a participatory culture that contrasts witholder notions of passive media spectatorship. Rather than talking about media producers andconsumers occupying separate roles, we might now see them as participants who interact witheach other according to a new set of rules that none of us fully understands (3). Axel Bruns hascoined the term produsage (2) to refer to the blurred line between producers and consumers,while Jay Rosen has talked about the people formerly know as the audience. For some, theconsequences of this shift could be a new model of journalism, labelled participatory

journalism, (Domingo et al. 331), raising questions about who can be described as a journalist

and perhaps, even, how journalism itself is defined.

The trend towards a more participatory media ecosystem was evident in the March 2010 studyon news habits in the USA by Pew Internet. It highlighted that the news was becoming a socialexperience. News is becoming a participatory activity, as people contribute their own stories andexperiences and post their reactions to events (Purcell et al. 40). The study found that 37% ofInternet users, described by Pew as news participators, had actively contributed to thecreation, commentary, or dissemination of news (44).

This reflects how the Internet has changed the relationship between journalists and audiencesfrom a one-way, asymmetric model of communication to a more participatory and collectivesystem (Boczkowski; Deuze). The following sections considers how the ability of the audience to

participate in the gathering, analysis and communication of news and information requires a re-examination of the concept of ambient news.

A Distributed Conversation

As Ive discussed, ambient news is based on the idea of the audience as the receiver. Ambient


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journalism, on the other hand, takes account of how audiences are able to become part of thenews process. However, this does not mean that citizens are necessarily producing journalismwithin the established framework of accounts and analysis through narratives, with the aim ofproviding accurate and objective portrayals of reality.

Rather, I suggest that ambient journalism presents a multi-faceted and fragmented newsexperience, where citizens are producing small pieces of content that can be collectivelyconsidered as journalism. It acknowledges the audience as both a receiver and a sender. Isuggest that micro-blogging social media services such as Twitter, that enable millions of people

to communicate instantly, share and discuss events, are an expression of ambient journalism.

Micro-blogging is a new media technology that enables and extends society's ability tocommunicate, enabling users to share brief bursts of information from multiple digital devices.Twitter has become one of the most popular micro-blogging platforms, with some 50 millionmessages sent daily by February 2010 (Twitter). Twitter enables users to communicate with eachother simultaneously via short messages no longer than 140 characters, known as tweets.

The micro-blogging platform shares some similarities with instant messaging. It allows for nearsynchronous communications from users, resulting in a continuous stream of up-to-datemessages, usually in a conversational tone. Unlike instant messaging, Twitter is largely public,creating a new body of content online that can be archived, searched and retrieved.

The messages can be extracted, analysed and aggregated, providing a measure of activityaround a particular event or subject and, in some cases, an indication of the general sentimentabout it. For example, the deluge of tweets following Michael Jackson's death in July 2009 hasbeen described as a public and collective expression of loss that indicated the scale of theworlds shock and sadness (Cashmore).

While tweets are atomic in nature, they are part of a distributed conversation through a socialnetwork of interconnected users. To paraphrase David Weinberger's description of the Web,tweets are many small pieces loosely joined, (ix). In common with mass media audiences, usersmay be very widely dispersed and usually unknown to each other. Twitter provides a structure

for them to act together as if in an organised way, for example through the use of hashtagsthe# symboland keywords to signpost topics and issues. This provides a mechanism to aggregate,archive and analyse the individual tweets as a whole.

Furthermore, information is not simply dependent on the content of the message. A user'sprofile, their social connections and the messages they resend, or retweet, provide an additionallayer of information. This is called the social graph and it is implicit in social networks such asTwitter. The social graph provides a representation of an individual and their connections. Eachuser on Twitter has followers, who themselves have followers. Thus each tweet has a social graphattached to it, as does each message that is retweeted (forwarded to other users). Accordingly,social graphs offer a means to infer reputation and trust.

Twitter as Ambient Journalism

Services such as Twitter can be considered as awareness systems, defined as computer-mediatedcommunication systems intended to help people construct and maintain awareness of eachothers activities, context or status, even when the participants are not co-located (Markopouloset al., v). In such a system, the value does not lie in the individual sliver of information thatmay, on its own, be of limited value or validity. Rather the value lies in the combined effect ofthe communication.

In this sense, Twitter becomes part of an ambient media system where users receive a flow ofinformation from both established media and from each other. Both news and journalism are

ambient, suggesting that broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on communicationsystems such as Twitter are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and eventsaround them (Hermida 5).

Obviously, not everything on Twitter is an act of journalism. There are messages about almostevery topic that often have little impact beyond an individual and their circle of friends, from


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random thoughts and observations to day-to-day minutiae. But it is undeniable that Twitter hasemerged as a significant platform for people to report, comment and share news about majorevents, with individuals performing some of the institutionalised functions of the professional

journalist.

Examples where Twitter has emerged as a platform for journalism include the 2008 USpresidential elections, the Mumbai attacks in November of 2008 and the January 2009 crash ofUS Airways flight (Lenhard and Fox 2). In these examples, Twitter served as a platform for first-hand, real-time reports from people caught up in the events as they unfolded, with the cell

phone used as the primary reporting tool. For example, the dramatic Hudson River landing of theUS Airways flight was captured by ferry passenger Janis Krum, who took a photo with a cellphone and sent it out via Twitter.

One of the issues associated with services like Twitter is the speed and number of micro-bursts ofdata, together with the potentially high signal to noise ratio. For example, the number of tweetsrelated to the disputed election result in Iran in June 2009 peaked at 221,774 in one hour, froman average flow of between 10,000 and 50,000 an hour (Parr). Hence there is a need for systemsto aid in selection, organisation and interpretation to make sense of this ambient journalism.

Traditionally the journalist has been the mechanism to filter, organise and interpret thisinformation and deliver the news in ready-made packages. Such a role was possible in anenvironment where access to the means of media production was limited. But the thousands ofacts of journalism taking place on Twitter every day make it impossible for an individual

journalist to identify the collective sum of knowledge contained in the micro-fragments, andbring meaning to the data.

Rather, we should look to the literature on ambient media, where researchers talk about mediasystems that understand individual desires and needs, and act autonomously on their behalf (forexample Lugmayr). Applied to journalism, this suggests a need for tools that can analyse,interpret and contextualise a system of collective intelligence.

An example of such a service is TwitterStand, developed by a group of researchers at the

University of Maryland (Sankaranarayanan et al.). The team describe TwitterStand as anattempt to harness this emerging technology to gather and disseminate breaking news muchfaster than conventional news media (51). In their paper, they describe in detail how their newsprocessing system is able to identify and cluster news tweets in a noisy medium. They concludethat Twitter, or most likely a successor of it, is a harbinger of a futuristic technology that islikely to capture and transmit the sum total of all human experiences of the moment (51).While such a comment may be something of an overstatement, it indicates how emerging real-time, networked technologies are creating systems of distributed journalism.

Similarly, the US Geological Survey (USGS) is investigating social media technologies as a wayquickly to gather information about recent earthquakes. It has developed a system called theTwitter Earthquake Detector to gather real-time, earthquake-related messages from Twitter and

filter the messages by place, time, and keyword (US Department of the Interior). By collectingand analysing the tweets, the USGS believes it can access anecdotal information from citizensabout a quake much faster than if it only relied on scientific information from authoritativesources.

Both of these are examples of research into the development of tools that help users negotiateand regulate the streams and information flowing through networked media. They address issuesof information overload by making sense of distributed and unstructured data, finding a singleconcept such as news in what Sankaranarayanan et al., say is akin to finding needles in stacks oftweets (43). danah boyd eloquently captured the potential for such as system, writing that

those who are most enamoured with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as

though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and intune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate.

Conclusion

While this paper has focused on Twitter in its discussion of ambient journalism, it is possible that


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the service may be overtaken by another or several similar digital technologies. This hashappened, for example, in the social networking space, with Friendster been supplanted byMySpace and more recently by Facebook. However, underlying services like Twitter are a set ofcharacteristics often referred to by the catchall phrase, the real-time Web.

As often with emerging and rapidly developing Internet trends, it can be challenging to definewhat the real-time Web means. Entrepreneur Ken Fromm has identified a set of characteristicsthat offer a good starting point to understand the real-time Web. He describes it as a new formof loosely organised communication that is creating a new body of public content in real-time,

with a related social graph.

In the context of our discussion of the term ambient, the characteristics of the real-time Webdo not only extend the pervasiveness of ambient news. They also enable the former audience tobecome part of the news environment as it has the means to gather, select, produce anddistribute news and information. Writing about changing news habits in the US, Purcell et al.conclude that peoples relationship to news is becoming portable, personalized, andparticipatory (2). Ambient news has evolved into ambient journalism, as people contribute tothe creation, dissemination and discussion of news via social media services such as Twitter.

To adapt Ian Hargreaves' description of ambient news in his book, Journalism: Truth or Dare?,we can say that journalism, which was once difficult and expensive to produce, today surroundsus like the air we breathe. Much of it is, literally, ambient, and being produced by professionalsand citizens. The challenge going forward is helping the public negotiate and regulate this flow ofawareness information, facilitating the collection, transmission and understanding of news.

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