Get Herald RSSOn Feb. 5, a tornado struck the South. As power lines died and homes collapsed, Union University in Jackson, Tenn., struggled to keep its students and faculty safe. There was an emergency information blog on Union's website, but when the server crashed, administrators needed a new plan, and fast.
They turned to Facebook, posting up-to-the-minute safety advice and images of the damage to the Union network page. Students followed suit, uploading their own live images, while alumni used the page to send messages to former classmates and professors.
That night, when CNN needed live footage of the damage, they used screenshots from the Facebook wall, and credited Facebook - not the students or Union - for the images.
Facebook has always boasted that theirs is a "real" network, a virtual community with links to the physical world, and Union's experience supports that claim. Indeed, I'm not surprised to see Union use Facebook in this way; it's about time they realized where their students actually look for information.
Nor am I shocked that CNN credited Facebook for the photos. This is all legal under Facebook's new platform agreement, where most of what you post belongs to the network. Though I have my personal misgivings about the new Facebook, the raging debate among young people about the changes is old news, and appears to be working in Facebook's favor. After all, no students have complained about CNN's coverage.
What shocks me about this story is that Union hasn't complained either, accepting CNN's appropriation as part of the Facebook deal. Is Union's choice to be open source with their footage the first step to making the Web 2.0 culture the norm? Is this the beginning of tomorrow?
In the recent history of technological and cultural transitions, academia has played a central role. In the 1960s, American culture wars pitted students and the ideological avant-garde against the bureaucratic regulation of university authorities. In the last decade, students have increasingly turned to new technologies, though academia has been reluctant to endorse e-books and Wikis as educational resources.
But a longer historical view reminds us that cultural change always occurs in such phases, that new ideas are often derided by the mainstream as suspicious before they cease to be "new" at all. Newspapers were regarded as a dangerous political medium right up until the invention of photography. Radio became "normal" when television replaced it as the "newfangled" form of entertainment.
In each of these transitions, the forces of the old media have complained that the new technology is dangerous because it doesn't fit the rules that hold society together, boundaries between public and private or elite and popular. In each case, society manages to stay intact, because new rules are written. To date, media technologies have failed to produce cultural anarchy.
But the collaborative, decentralized nature of Web 2.0 has critics and supporters predicting a paradigm shift, where the old fabric unravels and is left that way. And until now, they've appeared to be right. In my columns portending the arrival of a new social-regulation-book, a Web 2.0 establishment, I've sounded like a religious zealot predicting the arrival of the messiah who never shows.
To me, the Union-CNN collaboration is a second coming: Web 2.0 technologies, I now believe, have become the normal means of interaction for traditionalists and tech-geeks alike.
Looking around me at Brown, I have seen other signs of that change. In my freshman year, I remember marveling at the professors who were savvy enough to navigate WebCT. As a sophomore, I smiled at a professor who struggled to pronounce Wikipedia, but was appreciative that he'd heard of the site. Now, only two years later, a whole lecture hall laughed derisively at the professor who couldn't figure out how to stream video online. Better still, the professor felt compelled to apologize for her "ineptitude."
Turning on the television at home, I watched an elderly woman - maybe eighty-five years old - explain that in January 2009, all cable signals will switch to digital. The analog TV with the tracking dials in your parents' basement won't work anymore. That the advertisers chose her to communicate their message is telling. It's a sign that women her age are jumping on the digital bandwagon and that(she reminds us) by next year, it will be the only bandwagon out there in TV land.
For enthusiasts like myself, the transition from calling digital technologies "new media" to simply "media" is a bittersweet one. After all, if they cease to be new, I'll have to find something else to decipher and explain in my columns.
On the other hand, I'm excited to see these technologies as the norm. The idea of graduating from college as a new beginning is a cliche that parents tell their children, but for the class of 2008, leaving Brown at a moment when the technology and culture of our college years have pervaded mainstream life, it just might be true.
Maha Atal '08 is jumping on the digital bandwagon
