Several stories recently made me think we are edging toward a strange new reality - one in which everything is distorted. It brings to mind Alice in Wonderland. Or, perhaps the better analogy is the quantum physics world, where the very act of observing or measuring something changes the experiment and the outcome.
So what am I talking about? Let me list the threads behind this thinking and then I will tie them together.
- David Carr's piece in the New York Times, Breaking the Story that Isn't, talks about the hall of mirrors effect that happens when reporters try to sniff out each others' stories (and write about them). It starts out:
Reporters have always kept an eye on other reporters... but what if watching your competitor becomes the whole story? More and more inside the echo chamber... there are published reports about what other reporters might be doing. On the Web, it takes nothing more than a rumor, or even a rumor of a rumor.
Later, he relates a conversation with a source about a story in progress who said: "You realize you are daring me to do a post about what you are working on, right?"
- There was a news report earlier this week that an Israeli raid had to be called off because a soldier leaked details in advance on his Facebook page.
- I heard a news report on talk radio about a Web site called Please Rob Me (see Consumerist post about this) that searches Twitter and uses geolocational tools like FourSquare to monitor people's activities, discover their comings and goings and identify which houses are empty.
- My own experience in seeing news get leaked prematurely because some tenacious blogger ferreted the information out from some public filing or other source.
- My own observation that reporters and PR folks are becoming increasingly transparent about what they are working on, by spilling their guts on Twitter, for example.
- The feeling of surprise (and sometimes twinge of annoyance) when people note your Facebook interactions ("Oh, I see you are now friends with...")
What these items have in common is the increasingly mercurial nature of info and efficiency of the Web and social networks in disseminating it.
The fact that people are so freely wearing real time information about what they are doing on their sleeves has many implications for journalists and communicators such as PR professionals and bloggers. Reporters - the good ones, anyway - will increasingly take their cues from bloggers and get better at chasing the digital breadcrumbs that indicate a potential story. By contrast, an emerging skill for the PR field will be the ability to contain info rather focus so much on getting it out.
In an age of info glut, it is often the lack of information that can create a sense of allure and generate interest (Google and Apple are masters at this).
The teams that can successfully create suspense and build on it, i.e. manage the sharing and dissemination of info without letting the story get out and ahead of them (no small task these days) will be the ones that get people to stop and take note.
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