Rita J. King in her recent interview with JD Lasica.

While at the June 2009 140Conf, Rita J. King was interviewed by long-time Online Journalism guru, JD Lasica about the ethics of cultural collaboration, online identity and the evolution of journalism with the advent of social media. Lots of great nuggets inside. Take a look

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[Originally published on DIP's Dispatches from the Imagination Age.]

By Rita J. King

At the #140conf in NYC yesterday I served on a panel moderated by Joshua Fouts, Digital Diplomacy and Cultural Collaboration. 44 tweets and retweets were generated by the comments, and I received several requests for fielding ethical questions related to the use of Twitter as well as the publication of Twitter names in a major publication. I wrote a statement prior to the panel, and while I didn’t deliver directly from the written comments, that statement, which sums up my position, is pasted below:

Twitter’s #iranelection demonstrates that the digital culture is tied irrevocably to the physical world. The digital is real.

The developing ethics of cultural collaboration can help us avoid turning this magnificent tool for greater understanding into an instrument of further destruction through misinformation, a tragedy made all the more ironic for its motivation: the desire to meaningfully connect with others or, in the case of #iranelection, to participate in the world’s first digitized revolution.

Understanding issues related to anonymity and the creative construction of digital identities is critical. In 2001 I wrote a cover story for the Village Voice, “Terms of Service: Sweaty Scenes from the Life of an AOL Censor.”

“Just as playing Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t turn a kid into a wizard, pretending to be a homicidal maniac on line doesn’t make a man a killer. But what it does make him is one of the greatest ethical dilemmas facing modern society.”

Last night one of my friends called after midnight because she needed to know how to use Twitter so she could follow #iranelection. “What is RT?” she asked. “What is RT?”

“It means retweet,” I said. Then I explained the hashtag, and the etiquette of including handles in a retweet, and editing to stay within the 140 character limit.

“People are switching their locations to Tehran,” she said, “to protect protesters.”

I’ve been hearing people suggest this constantly in the last day, but is it the right thing to do? It might serve a purpose, but won’t it also deliberately obscure the ability of Iranians to communicate with one another? And won’t it give the impression that more Iranians are tweeting at a time when many people have reported that Iranians they follow have stopped?

Is switching your location to Tehran if you’re really not in Tehran ethical?

“But people are dying,” my friend said. “Look, is it unethical for a person in Second Life to create an avatar that can walk if that person is really in a wheelchair in the physical world? In that case, lying serves a purpose, to transcend limitations.”

I do not believe that creating an environment in which a paraplegic’s avatar can walk is the same as listing one’s location as Tehran. Human beings are well capable of suspension of disbelief, which amounts to trusting one another to create a collaborate narrative that highlights the most authentic aspects of how we see ourselves and one another, to explore, to push the boundaries of what it means to co-create the mixed-media, mixed-reality world in which we live.

Twitter is important. Clay Shirky just gave a TED talk to the State Department, and the State Department asked Twitter to postpone a shutdown to keep more Iranians communicating.

TED founder Chris Anderson said,”Spend half an hour looking at the #iranelection stream on twitter and browse some of the vivid individual accounts of what’s happening on the ground. Then see how a massive number of non-Iranians have begun declaring their solidarity. Feel nothing? (Are you human?!)”

We will move from here toward augmented realities and telepresence. We cannot go backward from this evolution in human consciousness, but the road ahead will be dangerous as the shift occurs. We are forming a sense of global ethics that sits like an overlay map on a three-dimensional framework of different rituals, customs and systems of belief. We are doing this together.

"Sampling of election night Twittering" Image credit: Krazydad/jbum.

By Joshua S. Fouts

In the last few weeks there have been a spate of articles announcing the “who’s who” of the glitterati (and the soon-to-be Twitterati), listing names and Twitter profiles of what current, former, or soon-to-be-famous people are sharing their opinions, thoughts and -isms 140 characters at a time. This resulted, for many, in a huge increase (in the order of hundreds of thousands of people) following them (meaning monitoring their 140 character transmissions) on Twitter.

This week we have three prominent news stories — two backlash and one analysis — from mainstream public opinion and media outlets. (Less recently, there have been reports on established outlets like Nightline, and Charlie Rose. Andy Sternberg has a good summary on NetZoo.)

The analysis comes from AdAge.com, in today’s article, “Twitter: We Can Do What Google Can’t.” (Almost simultaneously, a quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt surfaced in which he called Twitter, and its ilk “poor man’s email systems.”) AdAge.com’s uthor Michael Learmonth reports that Twitter’s ultimate revenue model may be in harnessing its millions of on-the-minute observation:

a search of “what’s happening — right now.”

The backlash stories include Republican media strategist Mark McKinnon in Tina Brown’s TheDailyBeast.com and pundit and comedian Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.

Jon Stewart’s piece on The Daily Show is laugh out loud funny, including a scene where DS correspondent Samantha Bee is too distracted twittering to actually do her report. Appropriately, Stewart takes the piss out of members of Congress who, instead of paying attention to the State of the Union twittered often inane comments. Or, as Stewart put, reading these Congressional tweets was, “like you’re right at the State of the Union Address, sitting next to someone incredibly uninteresting.”

DIP’s Rita J. King says she thinks having Members of Congress Twitter isn’t necessarily a bad thing if they can learn to use it properly. King, who for many years was an investigative journalist who regularly attended and reported on public and Congressional hearings related to the nuclear industry, says she wished there had been a way for her to share thoughts in real time with people who might be interested. Just because the capacity to share them at the time didn’t exist, it didn’t mean she wasn’t there thinking about things.

Rita had already mentioned that it was very conspicuous that Members were all on their devices. “As with anything, moderation is the key. There is no need for these people to comment on everything. Pay attention, but also let us know what you are thinking when those thoughts are compelling.” In fact, she argues, “what Members of Congress choose to say in those moments tells us something about them as people. And that’s valuable in a democracy. Not everything that everyone says is going to be interesting all the time. Now that people’s thoughts are being put out there in real time, it would be good to increase the value of what’s being thought. It is beneficial for people to have a discernment process over what’s worth saying and which fleeting thoughts are best left to the recesses of one’s own mind.”

Mark McKinnon makes a facile and redundant point about the importance of friends and how Twitter is no place to make friends. His most saccharine point is delivered in this graf:

Instead of spending hours trying to add to the number of friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter, I’ve decided to spend that time on the handful of people I really care about. I write them real letters. I try to remember their kids’ names and their birthdays. I want to know about their lives. I want to know if they are happy in their marriages; in their careers. If they’re not, or if they are sick, I want to know if there is something I can do to help. Meaningful friendships require constant attention, nourishment, feeding and watering. It requires quality time. Not just a Tweet.

The AdAge.com article reveals an important angle. As did the Daily Show about Congress frittering away its time twittering during the SOTU speech. For me, Twitter is an organic, stream of ideas and thoughts about a particular moment of time. I don’t use it to track or develop relationships, but this is an inevitable side effect of using Twitter, and it can be a very positive thing. I view it as a dip into the cultural zeitgeist, and in the meantime, it does connect me more to the whereabouts, thoughts and lives of my friends.