The Challenge of the New Social Media

Taken from here (with Kippah Tip to Max Boot):

Don’t view the new real-time information realities as a threat but an opportunity. Identify those elements of the fast-growing, almost infinite multi-media language where you can compete effectively for the information high ground, then do so with self-confidence. … Not to enter the immediate post-crisis media space will often carry a higher price than entering it imperfectly. The aim must remain to act assertively and swiftly in the hope of commanding that space, however briefly or imperfectly. … Remove any entrenched institutional resistance to being force to feed the news beast. … Shed the instinct of hierarchy and the need for executive control from the highest level. … Empower the junior...officials, executives, and public servants to respond. … Devolve responsibility for handling real-time information to lower levels...

Whew.

That's some challenge.

Nik Gowing(*), the author, explains:

...new information technologies and dynamics are together driving a wave of democratisation and accountability. It shifts and redefines the nature of power in such moments. It also creates a new policy vulnerability and brittleness for institutions, who then struggle even harder to maintain public confidence.

Increasingly routinely, a cheap, "go-anywhere" camera or mobile phone challenges the credibility of the massive human and financial resources of a government or corporation in an acute crisis. The long-held conventional wisdom of a gulf in time and quality between the news that signals an event and the whole truth eventually emerging is fast being eliminated. The new lightweight technologies available to almost anyone mean a new capacity for instant scrutiny and accountability that is way beyond the narrower, assumed power and influence of the traditional media...

..."information doer": one of the hundreds of millions with an electronic eye now found anywhere...The core implications are twofold. First, this new technical reality has dramatically foreshortened the news and information cycle from a few hours to often no more than a few minutes. Second, those cellphones and digital cameras of the proliferation of new "information doers" have swiftly modified and broadened the assumed definitions of the media landscape in a crisis. The new ubiquitous transparency they create sheds light where it is often assumed officially there will be darkness.

(*) A 1996 piece he did.