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Creating Conversation Within a Network Society

May 23, 2008

Over the past year as the recreation correspondent for OurTahoe.org, I developed an interactive, environmental journalism Web site called, LifeMoreNatural.com. Life More Natural is a platform to for conversation about the environment and the role that outdoor enthusiasts play in sustaining it. Working within an existing network of outdoor enthusiasts, I’ve been able to create conversation and drive user-generated content. To do this, I had to change my relationship with my audience and frame the conversation as a collaborative effort in which all of us were both producers and consumers of the news and information at my site. In the process, a dramatic series of events put these efforts to the test.

On March 29, 2008 Ben Johnson, an extreme skier from Salt Lake City, Utah, broke his neck and nearly killed himself jumping off an 80-foot cliff in the World Telemark Free-skiing Championships. He’s lucky to be alive, let alone have full motion in his legs and be well on his way to recovery. Yet, Johnson’s accident highlighted more than just one skier making a bad decision and being forced to deal with the harsh consequences of crashing in the no-fall-zone. In a remarkable way, Johnson’s accident highlighted the role of journalism in communities and how that role has changed.

Johnson, a close friend of mine, was working with me to raise money to support disabled sports through a charity program that I set up called Athletes With a Cause. We were promoting the program at my environmental news and outdoor recreation Web site, LifeMoreNatural.com, and prior to his accident, Johnson had raised nearly $1000 in pledges. Throughout the spring, we updated Johnson’s progress with the program and his ski season at the site and the community interested in his ongoing story slowly increased.

When Johnson crash landed at the Telapalooza competition in Girdwood, Alaska, he dramatically changed the pace of people’s involvement and set off a flurry of journalistic activity both at my site and in the local Alaska papers. Most significantly, Johnson’s accident started a lengthy conversation online and in person among his friends and fellow outdoor enthusiasts, which eventually spilled out of its own network and brought into focus a broader understanding of the interplay between traditional institutions and the networks of people that are forming because of new communication technologies.

I learned of Johnson’s accident shortly after it happened and ran an initial story about it on my site. Word spread rapidly throughout Johnson’s network of friends and family and comments of support started pouring in for Johnson through the story. Information also began pouring in.

In the initial aftermath of the accident I received reports about Johnson’s state and the job the Alyeska Resort Ski Patrol did with the rescue that weren’t accurate. Through email, phone calls to me and comments directly on the my Web site, people on the ground in Alaska kept me informed about the events and the story continued to evolve. Before long, people in the know began using the comments section on Johnson’s story to report updates about Johnson’s surgery and a detailed timeline of his accident and rescue. Suddenly, I wasn’t playing the role of a traditional journalist of collecting the facts and reporting them back to the people. I became a participant and observer within a community of interested people capable of disseminating the information that they wanted and needed themselves. My site began to serve the purpose that it was established for, to facilitate informed conversation among a network of people through which understanding and context could be reached. But when a local paper ran an opinion piece about Johnson that didn’t take into account his role within this network and didn’t acknowledge these shared understandings and the context of Johnson’s story, the whole tone of the conversation changed.

In the Sunday, April 6th Outdoors section, the Anchorage Daily News ran an opinion piece by columnist Craig Medred about Johnson’s accident that spoke from a traditional frame of journalism, that of being the community’s watchdog. Rather than talk to people close to the situation and get their perspective on the events, Medred used Johnson and his accident to highlight a growing, and perhaps discomforting, trend: the increased extremism in outdoor sporting competitions.

Medred’s point, I learned later through talking with him, was that corporate America, in this case Alyeska Resort, is responsible for these kinds of accidents because of the way they market extreme competitions. By itself, his opinion wasn’t damaging, but the inaccurate way that he used Johnson to express his opinion was. Without talking to anyone close to the situation about Johnson’s reasons for jumping off the cliff, his history of doing similar and even bigger things, Medred portrayed Johnson as a money grabbing, “tool for the man” who was basically suckered into hurting himself by corporate America.

As a response, I posted a comment on Johnson’s story on my site asking people to help me influence the Anchorage Daily News to run a correction. By the time I had posted my comment, Medred’s story had already fired up his own readers to post comments on his story, some in agreement, but many disappointed with the way he chose to approach this story.

Medred has a reputation in Alaska of writing sensational pieces that get rankle his readers, but as one of his readers commented on this story, “Craig, I know you got your job because of the newspapers your inflammatory style sells for the man you work for, but it sure is a bummer that your name is the one on the Outdoors section of the largest newspaper in Alaska. This article may be your new low.”

To be fair, Medred’s wasn’t a bad opinion and had it been run even a week later the response probably wouldn’t have been that significant. The point here is that because of the inaccurate portrayal of Johnson, who had a highly motivated and active community behind him, the overwhelming response was an indication of the former audience’s ability, even those who don’t hold formal positions of power, to hold journalists and papers accountable for their actions.

The users of my site, predictably by that point, took up action and started posting comments to Medred about his piece. Also predictably, Medred never responded. I spoke with the editor of the ADN and asked for the space to run an opposing opinion piece. But while that was being worked out, letters to the editor were coming in from all over the country and some people were even taking it upon themselves to call the businesses whose advertisements were placed with the story.

Three days later, the ADN took the story down and made it available on by purchase until April 16th, after another skiing accident in which a young man was killed. Because of this, an interesting crossover of readership occurred when a person who identified his or herself simply as ADN Reader wrote on my site:

“The efforts to censor Medred’s piece disturb me a little. The piece was crummy - everyone agrees to that but why rally to have it removed? If ADN caves into protest from people posting here, then it shows that it lacks journalistic integrity. You might disagree with what was said - but think about this incident the next time someone writes something disagreeable about Pebble Mine, Red Dog Mine or Senator Stevens (controversial Alaskan topics). If ADN removes this piece, the next unfavorable editorial might be removed before you have a chance to read it.”

I thanked the ADN reader for the thoughtful comments and explained that censorship was an unintended consequence of our actions but never my intention. What we intended was to have the ADN run a retraction or to give me the space to publish an opposing opinion, which they eventually did. However, this piece of the unfolding events is important for what it says about the culture of networks and the changing relationship between those networks and the traditional institutional structures of our society.

Networks create their own culture. By forming around topics of specific interest, people come to shared understandings, but also shared identities. A network creates a feedback loop for itself and for the individuals that make it up, which reinforces the values, ideas, and identities of the group. In this case, the network associated with Life More Natural had become identified with Johnson’s situation, myself included. When an opinion that didn’t match the sentiment of the community filtered in from the outside, the network responded with intense opposition to that opinion and the institution that supported it. As geographic communities continue to fragment into networks of like-minded people, journalists must make themselves aware of the identities that make up these communities of interest and be sure to put stories in context that conscious of the conversations that form around these networks.

Comments continued to pile up on both my site and the Medred story, now with a good number of them discussing the ethics of journalism and the role that it plays in a community. I continued to work with the ADN to get an alternate opinion piece published. At this time, I also became aware of another, independent, conversation thread was taking place regarding Johnson’s accident and the Medred article at a Web site called www.telemarktalk.com, a chat forum for telemark skiers. There was a mix of perspective on this site as well, but again with a disproportionate number of comments in opposition to Medred and his views.

It’s not that Medred didn’t see himself as providing a service to the community, in fact he thought he was providing an important service.
“If this story prevents even one or two kids from doing the same thing, then I’ll die a happy man,” Medred told me.

That’s not a bad position to hold, and in another situation, he may have been right to express it in the way that he did. However, Medred’s position is emblematic of an older relationship between journalism and the communities of people that serve as the audience, a relationship best symbolized by that of a watchful parent to a child.

For the past 80-years, journalism has had a monopoly on the information that people inherently crave as news, and so has been able to maintain a disconnected, objective attitude about that information, as well as to its audience. Journalism no longer has that monopoly. Information is free flowing and instantaneous now and so for journalism to stay relevant, the relationship must change.

Where Medred treated his audience as disconnected consumers of his opinion, I treated my audience as collaborators. Where Medred saw his actions as providing a service to his community, I saw myself as a member of a community whose role it was to ask how I could be of service. I was able to create a conversation that didn’t focus first and foremost on objectivity, but on working through the issues that were challenging the network of people that were using Life More Natural as a platform. Through this conversation, we each became both consumers and producers of the news and information, and in my role as a facilitator, I was eventually able to integrate the unwelcome outside opinion into the conversation in a way that furthered the search for context and understanding towards a sense of truth.

For me, the specific occurrence that speaks to the importance of conversation in seeking understanding and truth were my two phone conversations with Medred himself. Because of my connection to the Life More Natural network, and my close friendship with Johnson, I was perhaps more outraged than anyone about Medred’s piece. In those conversations, Medred was able to express more clearly what his specific argument was, and though we never reached agreement about the nature of extreme competitions, I was at least able to understand Medred’s frame of reference and placate my emotions. But because Medred never allowed a similar dialogue to build between himself and the audience, many people were never able to achieve an understanding that framed both perspectives.

What these events have proven to me above all else is that individuals matter, but working together and maintaining open, instantaneous lines of communication is where the true power of our communities lie. Between my stories about Johnson, Medred’s piece, the telemarktalk.com forum, and Johnson’s recent blog post on my site, over 400 comments were posted about these events, which doesn’t include at least another hundred replies to those comments from other users. In today’s information society, people are ready and willing to take part in the process of news generation and are capable of holding journalists and news organizations accountable.

As people become more accustomed to new communication technologies, and use these technologies to form their own networks and communities of interest, they increasingly produce and share their own information and news, shutting out traditional institutions and contrary opinions. In this new and changing environment, if journalists are going remain relevant, and if we are going hold on to our main creeds and ideals, we must integrate ourselves into these networks in order to bring objectivity, broader context, and the search for truth to the conversation.

The first step in changing the relationship between journalism and its former audience must be a shift in the way that journalists and news organization see themselves within a community. Rather than disconnected, objective purveyors of truth and fact for our communities, we must become members of our communities. Rather than have the first and last word about the news that is intrinsically important to our community members, we must merely be one voice amongst many. The most important aspect of this change is that rather than seeing our audience as consumers of the information we provide, we must see them as collaborators in conversation about the issues that impact us all.

Conversation is a process of give-and-take and to engage in it we must share with our audience a role of being both producers and consumers of news and information. Because networks develop around shared values and identities, there is a danger that they isolate themselves from other perspectives and that as a network society rises, so will a fragmented one. By bringing objectivity, perspective and an insatiable search for truth to the conversation, journalism and journalists can help stem this danger and connect people across networks. However, we must first join the conversation.

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Written by Allan Warren · Filed Under Recreation 

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