This trend isn’t specifically a result of the growth of social media or even the rise of the web in general, Stray says. In fact, the research he describes — a study published earlier this year (PDF link) by two researchers at Columbia University — shows that it has been going on more or less continuously since the beginning of what we call the mass-media era in the 1950s (an era that itself may just have been an accident of history, as I discussed in a recent post). “Contextual” journalism of various kinds has been climbing steadily and conventional fact-based reporting has been declining.

As Stray puts it: “Journalists are increasingly in the business of supplying meaning and narrative. It no longer makes sense to say that the press only publishes facts.” He notes that no one really needs a news organization whose sole job is to tell us what the White House is saying when all of their press briefings are posted online — an extension of the principle that now “sources can go direct,” an idea proposed by media theorists like blogging pioneer Dave Winer. As a result, Stray says, journalism has to figure out how to “move up the information food chain” and provide more than just facts.

If context is all, what happens to objectivity?

Interestingly enough, both Stray and the authors of the study note that this kind of journalism doesn’t even have an agreed-upon name. Some call it in-depth reporting, some call it longform journalism, some refer to it as analytical or explanatory, but it has no established terminology. As the study’s authors note:

“Although this category is, in quantitative terms, easily the most important change in reporting in the past half century, it is a form of journalism with no settled name and no hallowed, or even standardized, place in journalism’s understanding of its own recent past.”

Stray, who runs a data-visualization project for Associated Press and also teaches computational journalism at Columbia University, says that he believes one reason for the lack of discussion about this change in the media is that it conflicts with the view that journalists have to be scrupulously objective — in other words, that they provide “just the facts, ma’am.” If everything requires context and interpretation, then that means an end to the rigid version of objectivity that many journalists were trained to accept and the rise of other values such as transparency and engagement.

“This seems to be a tricky place for truth in journalism. Much easier to say that there are objective facts, knowably correct facts, and that that is all journalism reports. The messy complexity of providing real narratives in a real world is much less authoritative ground.”

It may be messy and complex, but I think Stray is right when he says that the shift must be made — and that the desire for context helps explain the rise of unbalanced outlets like Fox News, but also of commentary-based journalism of the kind practiced by publishers like Gawker Media and even individuals like Andrew Sullivan. Where the trend ultimately takes us remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn

One concrete example of this emerged within days of the Israel Defense Forces launching what they called Operation Pillar of Defense (which came complete with its own Twitter hashtag). According to several reports, the Israeli army asked citizens not to post the details of attacks or troop movements on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram because they might inadvertently reveal the location of specific targets. One political blog that was briefed by the IDF as part of its media strategy wrote:

“Bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook friends of Israel were reminded by our IDF contacts not to say exactly where rockets have landed or even when/where alert sirens have blared… The siren and landing reports are helping the terrorists hone their aim, making it a bit easier to target/kill civilians.

It’s one thing to say the troops are building outside of Gaza, and its something totally different reporting that you saw a tank moving down main street at 3pm… that information can tell Hamas where (and when) a land action may be coming.”

Information flow has been democratized

Anyone over a certain age or with a knowledge of military history will no doubt see the similarities between this and the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” propaganda campaigns of World War II, which warned citizens of the U.S. and other Allied countries that spreading specific information about military attacks could threaten the war effort. But that was aimed at a much smaller phenomenon — namely, people talking to others who might have connections to the military. Now, anyone with a smartphone is capable of publishing not just a few sparse details about an attack but specific longitude and latitude co-ordinates, images, video and more.

Think about what happened when the U.S. Navy Seals targeted Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan: a computer programmer named Sohaib Athar spent a couple of hours live-tweeting details of that attack without even knowing what he was doing. If the Navy had been involved in a more prolonged attack, those details could have easily helped Al-Qaeda determine how many troops were involved, what types of aircraft, what kinds of weapons, and much more. That kind of data can change the nature of a military campaign, especially when combined with “big data”-style algorithms and mapping technology that is now commonplace.

Every war is now a social-media war

And while the Israeli military may think that it is somehow controlling the flow of information with its live-blog or its Twitter account or its Tumblr propaganda campaign, it is just one stream in a giant ocean of data flowing from individuals who are both observing and participating in the attacks — including soldiers who are posting photos of themselves to Instagram and Facebook, pictures of drone missions that are being aggregated through a site called Dronestagram, and many other similar examples. Everything that is geo-tagged becomes a potential source of crucial information about the Israeli action and the response by Hamas.

Part of my interest in this phenomenon is just the way that the media we use helps shape the world around us, but I’m also fascinated because my father was a Canadian Air Force officer who worked with NATO on designing what are called “command-and-control systems,” including the military version of modern information theory — in other words, figuring out how information flows can affect military strategy.

In the not-so-distant past, crucial information flowed primarily from the top down, and battlefield data was hard to accumulate or distribute efficiently, apart from the usual word of mouth and rumor-mongering engaged in by soldiers. The internet and social tools have altered that structure significantly, however, despite the military’s best efforts to regulate them. And during a real-time campaign, social media may be a great way of distributing the government’s marketing message about the conflict, but it’s also a great way for anyone involved to publish what could be critical details of an attack — and that is difficult, if not impossible, to defend against.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

The study, which MIT’s Technology Review highlighted in a recent post by the Physics arXiv blog, was done by a pair of researchers in Virginia, Hany SalahEldeen and Michael Nelson. They took a number of recent major news events over the past three years — including the Egyptian revolution, Michael Jackson’s death, the elections and related protests in Iran and the outbreak of the H1N1 virus — and tracked the links that were shared on Twitter about each. Following the links to their ultimate source showed that an alarming number of them had simply vanished.

After two and a half years, 30 percent had disappeared

In fact, the researchers said that within a year of these events, an average of 11 percent of the material that was linked to had disappeared completely (and another 20 percent had been archived), and after two-and-a-half years, close to 30 percent had been lost altogether and 41 percent had been archived. Based on this rate of information decay, the authors predicted that more than 10 percent of the information about a major news event will likely be gone within a year, and the remainder will continue to vanish at the rate of .02 percent per day.

It’s not clear from the research why the missing information disappeared, but it’s likely that in many cases blogs have simply shut down or moved, or news stories have been archived by providers who charge for access (something that many newspapers and other media outlets do to generate revenue). But as the Technology Review post points out, this kind of information can be extremely valuable in tracking how historical events developed, such as the Arab Spring revolutions — which the researchers note was the original impetus for their study, since they were trying to collect as much data as possible for the one-year anniversary of the uprisings.

Other scientists, and particularly librarians, have also raised red flags in the past about the rate at which digital data is disappearing. The National Library of Scotland, for example, recently warned that key elements of Scottish digital life were vanishing into a “black hole,” and asked the government to fast-track legislation that would allow libraries to store copies of websites. Web pioneer Brewster Kahle is probably the best known digital archivist as a result of his Internet Archive project, which keeps copies of websites dating back to the early days of the web (Kahle also has a related project called the Open Library).

Getting access to social data is not easy

Although the Virginia researchers didn’t deal with it as part of their study, a related problem is that much of the content that gets distributed through Twitter — not just websites that are linked to in Twitter posts, but the content of the posts themselves — is difficult and/or expensive to get to. Twitter’s search is notoriously unreliable for anything older than about a week, and access to the complete archive of your tweets is only provided to those who can make a special case for needing it, such as Andy Carvin of National Public Radio (who is writing a book about the way he chronicled the Arab Spring revolutions).

As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in a recent post, an external service called Gnip now has access to the full archive of Twitter content, which it will provide to companies for a fee. And Twitter-based search and discovery engine Topsy also has an archive of most of the full “firehose” of tweets — although it focuses primarily on content that is retweeted a lot — and provides that to companies for analytical purposes. But neither can be linked to easily for research or historical archiving purposes. The Library of Congress also has an archive of Twitter’s content, but it isn’t easily accessible and it’s not clear whether new content is being added or not.

Twitter has talked about providing a service that would let users download their tweets at some point, but it hasn’t said when such a thing would be available — and even if users did create their own archive in this way (or by using tools like Thinkup from former Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani) it would be difficult to link those in a way that would provide the kind of connected historical information the Virginia study is describing. And it’s not just Twitter: there is no easy way to get access to an archive of Facebook posts either, although users in Europe can request access to their own archive as a result of a legal ruling there.

For better or worse, much of the content flowing around us seems to be just as insubstantial as the clouds that it is hosted in, and the existing tools we have for trying to capture and make sense of it simply aren’t up to the task. The long-term social effects of this digital amnesia remain to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock user Ribah and Flickr user See-ming Lee