"This is the true story... of five strangers picked to live in a house, work together and report only from Twitter... to find out what happens... when the Internet stops being polite... and starts getting real."
It sounds like the intro to another bad reality TV showand it almost is. Five journalists have decided to embark on a new Internet experiment to see whether they can effectively report on the news by using Twitter and Facebook, and nothing else. They have agreed to live in a remote farmhouse in France with heavily-restricted Internet access so they can test the value of social networks as a news medium once and for all.
The "experiment" is being organized by the RFP French-language public broadcasters association and will begin on February 1. Though it will only last for five days, the participants, who hail from Canadian, French, Belgian and Swiss radio stations, will have to trade their smartphones for mobiles that have no Internet access and they won't be able to watch TV, listen to the radio, or read newspapers. They will also be given wiped laptops with nothing on them and no Web access except for Twitter and Facebook.
The journalists must then report on as much news as they can using those two mediumspresumably, they can send @ replies and ask other Twitter users questions in order to glean more information. They will have a communal blog where they can report on the news, and they will talk about their experiences on their respective radio stations after the experiment is over. "Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources," France Inter editor Helene Jouan told
Agence France-Presse.
The challenge, of course, will be getting the details about specific events. After all, it's not hard to glean major headlines from social networks: in the course of writing this piece, I learned from Twitter alone that China said Google's accusations will hurt its relations with the US, astronauts on the International Space Station now have Internet access, the
Indie+Relief effort raised $143,000 for Haiti, the University of Illinois has raised tuition by 9 percent, and that Toyota recalled 2 million cars.
Now if I wanted to actually write a story about any of those things, I would need to learn more about the backstory and the people involved (I sure hope they're on Twitter!). At best, it might take quite a bit longer than usual to get the relevant information. At worst, I wouldn't be able to get enough of the info I need for a story. Worse still, I just picked up on a false headline and wasted time chasing a hoax without the luxury of being able to call anyone or follow up on the Web.
"This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter," Jouan said. Whether those myths are that social networks are worthless or that they're displacing real media remain unclear, but either way, we suspect the answer is somewhere in the middle.
