An hour with NPR Andy Carvin

when national public radio tweets more than one million people follow i'm kenny macintyre and today on k pr present the man behind npr's social media strategy andy carvin andy carvin is credited with playing a major role in using and shaping social media during the recent arab spring he spoke on citizen journalism and the arab spring at the university of kansas dole institute of politics on april eleventh two thousand twelve year with paul institute director bill lacy tell us about your early years your education and how you developed an interest in the internet that ultimately let you know where you are today so i don't have a background as a journalist i didn't study journalism it my university work in northwestern my graduate degree was in rhetoric and religion are which didn't exactly prepare me for the real world so i stuck around and got a master's degree in telecommunications signs the policy so for the earlier parts of my my career of the policy work but i work with to rewind even

further to that for that and that two of my childhood because i grew up from this business of a floor and not a farce of a nasa and i'm probably one of the boldest digital natives they're not part of the millennial generation but we had computers in our my first great caution back in the late seventies and the first time i well i think was nineteen eighty four i remember correctly when i was twelve thirteen years old and up so i was i live in a very strange eerie they gave me access to really smart people that were playing around with tools that didn't really seem to have a point yet that still seem rather curious and so but it's coming out of the college you know i didn't study internet policy your internet technology one thousand in college like i saw this something i wanted to do working with and so our very first up on one product a good job a website called at web from nineteen ninety four and the idea behind it was to look at how changes in telecommunications policy would potentially affect changes in

education policy because at that point people were musing at the idea to bring in the classroom and really hadn't started our end the web site did fairly well for the particular audience was in that end up in some ways it backfired because i started getting it milton from very smart people who know a lot more in the subject when it when they're asking very tough questions op n since i didn't have many answers for them i decided well wouldn't be better like get all these people talking about so i in october ninety four i credit my first our online community and it was that an email list dedicated to the role of the web and education's been running for eighteen years ah and it really brought home to me this idea that getting a grip people to talk openly and share their expertise and experience is can be a lot more powerful than doing things the same away behind the scenes and so throughout my career whatever i've been doing winters in education technology a policy wonk or now that i'm at

npr i've really try to embrace the notion of online communities really being about community and not just being a place online and that these are communities of real people with stories to share and expertise to share and if we give them opportunities to share that knowledge the sky's the limit jump right into their spring of what one of what then on what kind of in your mind made you think wow something is going on well what i'm trying to vigilant at work in the early mid two thousands i had never chances to travel overseas including a couple of trips to tunisia into the forty thousand five and i know a number of the local bloggers there as well as some bloggers in exile been for the country their political rise again i didn't know them very well but you know they invited me for coffee when i was there and we kept in touch through in our blogs and off now sort of hovering in the

background something was interested in and why was there i also got to experience the police apparatus firsthand because identity you at the un of that beforehand how's blogging rather openly about human rights issues and when i step around the country for next week afterwards they get one other way to make sure that i knew that they were paying attention what i was writing and so in two thousand and four i should be two thousand and ten and that december one of those very bloggers happen to be in the us on business he was there on december eighteen and we got together and easy for coffee and i don't we talk about all sorts of stuff and then i remember asking him so how are things at home and he knew what i was getting at and he does confront incident and some things never change it clearly did not want to talk about the political situation or what we didn't know is that very moment but that very day there was a young man in tunisian a total secrecy imam mohamed bouazizi whose output his car had been

confiscated by a corrupt government official because he would pay a bribe and so he decided to protest by sharing a can of gasoline to them local government building and set himself on fire and he died several weeks later but within hours of him attempting suicide on that day our relatives and friends came out an organized a solidarity protests for him in front of the building and so i recorded a video and that video quickly made a self made its way online to some of the waters that i've gotten to know a few years beforehand and they must've realized that there were that there was something really really important but was about to happen because they started to subvert the sensors as best we could getting the video and from places and then all the sudden solitary protests are happening in different places so the public the forties into the early twenty seven twenty thirteen i started seeing him tweeting about using the keyword hashtags cd dizzy and when i realized that were protests haven't sat back and thought wow this was exposed to happen and i remember on december

twenty eight well i was observing most of the holidays i tweeted i wonder if this could really become a jasmine revolution which i thought would be nation way to discredit ms jasmine is a natural national flower and apart from the tunisians no one knew what i was talking about because you know tunisia is a part of our national mindset of what the middle east is about events it was essentially a non entity in a minute mideast politics as far as we are concerned so no one in the west was really covering the protests as the group but they grew in growing exactly four weeks to the day that other young incidence of on fire the president was forced to flee the country in the first op populist revolution in modern arab history you find yourself holding an arab spring time at the center of information well i don't know that the center of that i think you're the way social media works is that you know anyone can choose to feel like they are the center of the periphery of any given conversation depending on how much they want to involve themselves in and so for much of the

tunisian revolution i thought i was on the periphery because i wasn't there i didn't know all the players on the ground but i knew just enough to get myself in trouble when i talk about it on twitter oh and so and it really wasn't until the last seventy two hours of the revolution when the police started getting very violent and protesters and they really start to spread towards the capital that i start ignoring my regular job duties and is trying to keep on twitter as long as possible in a new toothpaste in these things and getting all these things together into some coherent narrative our endowment as far as an hour was really the only person working in a western news organization there was attempting to do that before it became so self evident that everyone started sending people ever and so a few days later when story started to spread online that the egyptians were going to maybe have their own private practice in january twenty five people this week as necessary to cover that too but i don't know it will see what happens and so i put on my outlook calendar so we forget that it was happening and they are suddenly those protests exploded

into a national uprising and the next thing i knew within a matter of days i was on twitter et hours a day seven days a week talking with protesters doing essentially live and her coverage of what was happening on the ground and tucker square even though i was five thousand miles away in dc not just geared by a little bit of context because i bet a lot of people driven i think your job is to cover social media for npr where job npr senior strategist yeah and its illicit that reaction because when i was hired and her five and half years ago social media staff at news organizations didn't exist and i was abroad and i was i was recruited by a woman who was vice president and woman in the traditional woman andrea thomas who felt that over time and pure would have to learn to interact better with the online public because that was going to become more important and what they would do beyond that no one had an idea so she asked if i wanted to come on board and tinker

essentially and so ah i purposely made we chose the title senior strategist at one point because i wanted to confound people are and confounding people can be important in the newsroom because of my title were producer or editor or a reporter i would have never be certain expectations of what i could and couldn't get there is that there would be a hierarchy and in within the org chart they would allow me to do certain things not a lot to do with its senior strategist there's no place for senior strategist in our church nuns don't bother and so as long as i had a support abbas who allowed me to basically be guinea pig in residence at npr i could get away with running my own experiments and so over the last five years as a lot of my time before the the are true spent doing social media reporting experiments ruined politics and natural disasters so in two thousand and eight we were when we were not in their first news organization twitter is we actually joined in late two thousand and seven and out audrey presidential debates we would use twitter to fact

check and we would ask members of twitter to pay careful attention to what the candidates are saying and if they could provoke the candidates were saying was incorrect and they could supply us with the primary source to back up we asked them to tweet it with the keyword fact that we were monitored so during the debate it was the equivalent of us having a hundred fifty research assistance working for us as volunteers and out of course you have more than your fair share of fact that mccain's immediate fact checked obama's a jerk but with when she got over those partisan tweets there would be people saying fact check if you look at this pdf and the congressional budget office the page to thirty four you'll find a slide and it does not match what the candidates said i meet with about walking off and it really struck me as twitter is one of the geek is places i've ever been in these are my kind of people because most of the leaders are they were professional wants these are people who had certain things they were passionate about and they

develop their own areas of expertise and whether they were ever indicate on it didn't matter this was there their passion and their area of expertise and suddenly i certainly understand that if you just molded the right conversations on twitter you could tap into that collective knowledge and do more than any newsroom could do and so they came back through various things that a code over the course of four color of spring night tom what we use it as a couple of cases the couple or three where of social media really had a profound importance in the outcome in terms of the revolutions are in terms of reporting or both the revolution look at all in the case of egypt is a fascinating story because they basically used facebook use the rsvp for the revolution they told people a couple weeks ahead of time to save the bacon or twenty five you show up and are so many of the people who were there the first i found out about three social media and over time it started

to grow but what's interesting is i think the tipping point for the revolution was when social media can shut off because they were cold whether the internet fingers on the twentieth and the twenty nine of them fall of january and what he didn't realize is that with the pop with twenty percent of the population using the internet regularly in egypt and so not having access to it and so many other forms of medications been shut down by the government the only option they had was to go outside and talk to their neighbors about what just happened what was going on so they started assembling in public places and so unwittingly the government created this viral sense of public has a somewhat that had never happened before and then when they turned the internet back on you had people all of these places with their cellphones prepared a report on what was happening in these places and so during some of the main protest in tupper square on any given day there might be thirty forty people tweeting in real time and uploading videos and this would create this feedback loop with news organizations like al jazeera to get footage out which would then go through

satellite other parts of egypt or people would say and so so social media wasn't necessarily in charge of the revolution but it was accelerating it because it knew how to get around state authority and become available by other means all in other cases such as both libya and in syria for various periods of time it was impossible to get reporters and save what i don't like the first several weeks of libyan revolution there were no western reporters there and so we had to rely solely on what we define it for the internet or like iowa the fibrous and the ability in populations online so it took a bit of work to figure out who these people were more find them but once he figured that out suddenly those knicks incredible stream of information coming out people were setting up live streams they were sitting in youtube channels they were uploading extremely compelling footage that they'd never seen been seen before outside the country and so well the libyans weren't necessarily organizing the revolution using

social media their use of citizen journalism was so effective i would argue that it played a role in the decision for a nato bomb the country explain a force at the concept of crowdsourcing how to use crowdsourcing is a is a fancy schmancy internet we're off for four groups of people working together that's really all it means it's often used in the context of company is tapping into populations of people across the internet to work on complicated problems or two to solve other things are and it's it ended but it's not new the very first newspaper in the united states because independent paper which is published in sixteen at is some public utterances and was a four page broad sheet but on this four page is only three pages were printed they left the fourth page blank because they have a limited print run and they would leave copies of the arrival of the public houses and people would scribble latest news on a pass on to the next person and so literally the

history of american journalism begins with crowd sourcing and clever journalism we don't remember that are in the eighteen sixties during the civil war the confederate newspapers would publish in intercepted telegraphed tolerance from north and because they were included in the last republican helped crack i think more recently the things such as the unabomber we might've never caught by guys they hadn't posted his manifesto and papers and had a relative recognized the writing staff so these are all examples of crowdsourcing taking a certain problem or tissue and exposing into a wide array of people as possible in order to solve some and that's basically what i do on twitter and other types of social media i try to pull together groups of people in chile for a critical mass of expertise or eyewitnesses on something and ended an experimental forms poetry journals of them do you ever have any worries that some of the violent images and in the coverage of

social media might the sensitize people to violence or off your feet in this stereotype muslim people i don't worry about the stereotype honestly because i think for every violent video that i've seen coming from the arab spring there are ten other videos of people defiantly marching holding hands and their grandchildren ah you one thing that occurred to me sometime last spring is i thought you know i think americans will never look at the phrase a lot of the same way again because of the awful stereotype of thinking that's associated with suicide bombers whenever you so we're saying it people chanting image in the streets to steel themselves against the police attacked or two to a protest the regime are and so they're there's just so much footage coming out of the region that i think makes large swaths of the world very proud of what they've been trying to do

but the downside is are these videos that come out but at the same time i would argue the the violent videos that but you know it's interesting because up every now and then i like to attend a post a lot of these violent videos on twitter and very blunt about it will say this is a very graphic video three children were blown apart by a mortar and in possibly describe even more bluntly than that and my twitter followers are used to it because i've been doing this from day one and the way i've always presented to them is i feel like this is an opportunity for them to bear witness if they choose to and also the opportunities document what's going on and when people respond and say well you know mass media's not supposed to show footage like that on my response as one mass media couldn't show footage like that because for so many decades mass media was intended for family consumption op if you look at the history of newspapers in america are the history of television these were things that were experienced as a family or another community unit and so if you suddenly set over breakfast when newspapers showing lots of the children on the front page

it was not going to go out go over well but with the advent of the internet and social media and citizen journalism people have the choice to follow me on twitter they then have the choice to decide whether or not to view these videos and i imagine those people don't because i try to warn people not to watch them but i want to give people the choices while and o and npr is going to complete latitude they also understand that the ah the young standards of what would be acceptable content in terms of violence violent imagery is different from social media because of this choice factors we have a sense of what one set in egypt or libya or an easy a poem the citizens are realize that they were in power by social media and i think he's social media to work we'll pursue their objectives i think it's different in every confidence because the sheer differences like you in the frame and even then it's in the population is internet access in yemen it's like three

percent and so the dynamics of social media use in this country is really so different arm and depending on when a country really got involved but it also affects things like in tunisia it started completely off the radar and so they were able to get away with a lot on facebook of sharing what's videos and photos before authorities realized what was happening in the case of egypt the main facebook group that where much of this was planned have been around since as the previous summer and so are i think in many cases these were activists were waiting for the right moment and i don't think they weren't necessarily waiting for a social media moment or anything like that i think from their perspective these are digital natives who don't separate their online lives are not off one lives so when they were prepared to act of course they were going to use social media is they don't do anything else with that

it's just a part of who they are and so i don't think they were necessarily many people who had an aha moment and said it using twitter's going to put us over the top and we're going to win this revolution i think there are other factors that came into play so i think when the first very large pro and came into tucker's square and they hold the square after those people came and camel backwards backward and there are other pivotal moments mean and i think bowie them even further on in libya i've talked to people who said they felt as early as like december twenty three or four days in the revolution that they were going to win because that the event that they've been able to survive for four days without getting wiped out and that was enough of a sign for them all and so all it's you know it's it's it's hard to pinpoint exactly because every country is different every person has been different but i think they don't well either because it's so and that we think about

and you've interacted with hundreds probably thousands maybe tens of thousands maybe even the artist say personally but they read your tweet listen passively actually we asked why i had us software developer go through my tweets to see how many people have replied to over the last year and over two thousand people well but then they may have circulated questionnaires you been in contact at what people do you have an opinion just an opinion or are feeling for why these uprisings succeeded and egypt and libya and failed in syria well defined succeeded for one thing you know if they feel if you were in cairo i think it might be scratching their head wondering who actually did succeed of the young and the young the whole process of getting the government in order and having free fair elections has been quite a mess there's whatever presidential election in about six weeks and that keep changing their mind as to who's eligible to run who's not and it's it's just a total nightmare and in the the aisle a

large part of the protesting establishment were fairly liberal fairly secular and muslim brotherhood has grown significantly because they were always a part of the egyptian culture and community they just didn't have the chance to flourish because they were illegal before and so the revolutionaries are facing some pretty harsh realities they're in the case of libya is a lot of the looming doom being reported about how things are going there but when i was there last month every person except one that i can remember i was optimistic about the future and that and they were necessarily say that we're going to have clean free and fair democracy in the short term but they felt was important for them to stay and libyan start founding engineers another civil society organizations and to me that is such a huge step for them to get it right arm and so i'm still i still fairly bullish on over time the libyans figuring out with a bit of this like yemen where literally have a million people would protest every single week hundred people or so would die every single week and ultimately the president got away with it he waited and waited and

waited until he got a sweet enough deal to get complete immunity he retired and then basically says that the government so his sons could have as much power as possible so i think if you ask the average revolutionary they were successful and so you know ultimately all those tons of the country's internal dynamics i don't think it has to do necessarily with how well they used or didn't use social media availability for that might be a possibility as were in the rain because the government and the crime was really the only one that understood the propaganda power of social media and that they used they fought back as as aggressively on social media is that in the streets and how would you describe it the role you point were you a journalist were you a practice that that would ease credit so it depends on the day you are you know it's funny because as i'm doing all this but i can use the term journalist a very broad sense of the term but in some ways is

almost more accurately describe what i'm doing is a form of real time documentary making a loud because not everything that i am a collector and sharing is intended to be new sometimes just capturing emotions on the ground telling having the story speak for themselves some people compare the work they do to a form of love of dj were basically grabbing all these fees fees and beats in real time and spitting them back out to the public in some faraway that people are gonna wanna dance to essentially it's a strange comparison but in some ways it really makes sense in terms of the actual work of what i do are in terms of needing an active site i don't see myself as an activist have been very careful about not getting involved in the politics of any of these protests but you know anytime you're involved in covering a story of this magnitude the sheer act of covering a revolution broke shines light on it and the last thing a dictator wants is light on whatever it is they're doing in the last thing

they want is transparency is what's happening and so i think one can argue that journalism is a revolutionary act by definition whether i'm the one trying to cover what's going on in the country or citizen journalist or trying to do it because especially in their cases simply even if they are not seeing themselves as activists as they try to just go out and report what's going on as treasonous and so by definition they have taken aside by trying to document the truth and so all you know i i don't see journalism as this dialect at where we have to say oh it's time for the dictator get his five minutes because we just gave protesters five minutes you know and comfortable calling a dictator became well so want to be as transparent as possible and try to keep everyone on instant celebrity when protesters started getting propaganda or anything i see yes i call them wanted to arm which has blown up in my face and several occasions because some protesters just assumed that i was quote unquote working on because i was covering them they're not because of the way media works in their

country they assume that any type of coverage would only be done by someone who actually believes in what we're covering is everything is so skewed normally and the whole notion of just trying to cover the facts is alien to them a lot in some ways i think my my work and where over the last year has been one of the weirdest global media leaders experiments ever because it's exposing a lot of these people to their first taste of how journalism works and some could argue that by doing that it makes them better citizen journalist which makes them more effective than causes so where does that put me in terms of being on the barricades i don't know what i try to cover this fairly reasonable as possible did you ever for how we ever in a situation where you were brought brett gelman forceful action yeah there were a couple times an unfortunate at all basically one i think any journalist who receives a type of fret

about their organization goes into scary moment and it still with an appropriate manner i never felt look of this well i've never felt that any of the frets have ever receive are serious but we also offered serious so um but it's also weird world that i live and because all you know many the times i know that these are twitter accounts run by people halfway around the world and they're just trying to be told and cause trouble but at the same time they said you have to take these seriously i am so yes there've been a couple of unfortunate as it has been nothing but truly freaked me out i just had to be dealt with but i believe that at least one occasion maybe more you were like very close to the stevenson's phone call on the applause well it until last june i did all of my coverage of yours from remotely i was in the us this week the entire time and then finally that you and i had a chance to be in egypt for august on business and so it in part that if yesterday's meeting these

revolutionaries and one of them on twitter said hey great idea for a cocktail party and meet up and so the next thing i know i'm at this cafe garden cafe on the rooftop somewhere in downtown cairo where forty or so of the leading revolutionary twitter roddy where they're drinking they're non alcoholic beers and smoking cigarettes and having a grand ole time tony there were stores and then in the distance we hear a pop pop pop pop emily alone cause of their phones but the us all recognize what it was was a gunfight was tear gas going on and as soon as they pulled out their phones they still getting tweets and text messages from people who were there describing what was going on the forty people in that had a clear that within five minutes and they didn't freeways the first waves were the ones who are prepared to go to the barricades and for a rock acts the second waves were the ones who brought the cameras were prepared to cover the first what the document was going on and the third wave who worked trying to be assessed hospitable as possible about me and didn't wanna get me killed so they kind of

formed a cordon around me and tried to usher me into a car to go back to my hotel and i said well that's your guess is that way can we go in that direction and so i tweeted are i had literally tweeted something like famous last words hearing tear gas shots and choppers are they going to go check it out and we we got within about half the water walk talk or squares we found herself stuck between police lines there were dozens of place in front of us facing in the other direction and water flying over them towards us behind me were reinforcements right please waiting to go into action and they're like three or four of us caught in the middle and so altogether stand like idiots for thirty minutes try to pretend that you know maybe were supposed to be there for some reason and i'm going to try to get me to smoke cigarettes or blend in gaza i don't smoke know if you smoke a cigarette a month are so i mean i was proud of about thirty minutes it's hard to tell when all the stuff going on but you know just in front of me you could hear there were thousands of

people somewhere behind those right place tear gas was so strong only within maglica is that it was on my clothes for days like like i was fine like it i discovered a huge his approach but when it comes it comes to a tear gas it's your task to not take a hot shower afterwards it very cold shower because if you get to the hot one it will basically reignite on the fence and don't touch your clothes put him in a bag and get them water since possible i find that out all the hard work that unfortunately so here i am in the middle of all this action seeing hearing smiling feeling tasting what's going on but i had no idea what was going on i just didn't know i just knew there was a big crowd of people behind those police and anything beyond that was a no i can only guess and it wasn't until we managed to get out of there and i was the poor by phone and really scared my twitter timeline that i realized that there'd been a grip the families of those who've been killed earlier who are trying to arrange a memorial at some little theater police came and shut it down it turned into a

scuffle with turned into a fight which turned into a melee with a thousand people were injured by five thousand people from rocks molotov cocktails at the police and end there is no way i would have known any of that if it hadn't been for twitter all i knew is there's a fight happening over there my eyes are burning i don't know what's going on and it was really at that moment that i realized that the type of work and twitter is his complimentary to work on the ground because it takes a field reporter a combat reporter to tell those visceral stories that you will lead get from being there in person within the tech journalism i'm doing is providing form of situational awareness or collective intelligence by tapping into so many people at once it may not be the deep level of love but they're the same visceral nature of what you experience and personalizing pieced together things that you probably couldn't have you are hunkering down once got a small talks are finally caught on and so to rely on income from i'm going to ask one more question and opened up the cue and i went in the time picayune i from the

audience and just moments became a question about what's a student here and encourage a guest asked question made either there are a lot of students are lot of other people we're here to find out about arab spring that somebody is probably here to find out about now how can a very low social media if you could point to a couple of examples of places where they can go are ways that they can learn about really skillful use of social media were four you know it's tough because honestly i don't pay careful attention to these places you learned first personally for me i was fine that i get better at something by figuring out on my own and what i've discovered is that in pretty much any online community i've ever joined people are welcoming to new people as long as you go in admitting that your new when you don't really understand what's going on like for journalists the worst thing they can do is create a twitter update big story breaks and shop and say i am so and so from this news out and i need you to

keep the sourcing information weather and people on twitter hate that because you're intruding on their community whereas if you've just joined one that's a hammond journalist hello you'll learn the ropes of twitter which might be paying attention to what we should be learning from people on twitter open up people on facebook i think the greatest currencies on social media and twitter protect in particular are generosity knowledge and skills in no particular workers the generosity encompasses all of them but when you go into these communities there's often an expectation that if you were going to gather skills and informational the people you're expected to give back to the communities well i remember during his camera live of one of my friends online describe the product i was doing is giving blood that that and that always stuck with me because so much of the best things that happened on on social media and online news in general or because people are working together admitting there limitations admitting their strengths

and being transparent about it and so you know i can't really suggest though he would learn about this tour that cooler which witch what software you should be using for twitter or whatever are all i can tell you is that these are communities of real people people who want to be listened to who want respect but also have amazing sense of humor and amazing stories to tell and so if if especially if you're a journalist we're going to enter into journalism you have to drop that artifice of there you'd lean over here and the audience being over there is on twitter there's no difference on facebook there's no difference either you are part of the community or not end you know the display on american satirical you're listening to you andy carvin senior strategist for social media at national public radio he spoke with bill lacy director of the dole institute of politics at the university of kansas on

april eleventh two thousand twelve you or listening to k pr present on campus public radio npr's andy carvin now takes questions from the audience thank you un uses experimentation is yours analogy for describing a voice in the church your work talented and as you're testing things out where you are indicators of what would your car is the key indicators of successful things are testing and what side effects do you most worried about their variety of indicators will the ones i don't pay attention to our page views and hats and the number of twitter followers i have because i find most of the pre meaningless in terms of craving quality journalism and so when i look at these projects the first thing i ask is were we able to reporter and journalism in a way that we covered something from a whole new angle made our sourcing more diverse aw or prevented something important from falling through the cracks and

so in many ways the indicators are you start that different from a managing editor newsrooms to well whether or not they've had a good week in terms of what the reporting the farm so our which makes it hard to keep track of you know it's not like i can have a spreadsheet that says we're proud of these five stories and we reached these different diverse sources or whatever it's the kind of thing you know what happens on the one thing i do i do notice is that for example the two thousand elections i was social media for npr there was no one else so if you sign here and pure politics on twitter or anything else it that was me where is now ah pretty much everyone in our election unit is using social media in one way or another are not only running the main twitter accounts are running their own using them as part of the reporting engaging the public to improve the questions they have candidates are fine policy issues the monthly forward through the cracks to me that's the ultimate sign of success when i don't have to

do that work and the reporters are have understood the best way to integrate it into the reporting to make their drills and better that success to the eu but it was a brave being described as a revolution without leaders and i think that's part of the phenomenon that you've been describing workers that lead to that you know the rebels without a leader you know it's funny because you hear that a lot but you also hear that the places like online like with a pdf that you know it's completely flat community where everyone has equal rights but when you actually dig into it you'll still find that there's a small group of people who are exhibiting more aspects the leadership than others and are often making critical decisions because unless we meet one person's in charge but it means they're still the quarter mile and i think in any given any given revolution if you dug into it you will find these core people ah but what's interesting is they weren't necessarily the ones who started this is

some to some of these revolutions grew organically leadership group from within that organic growth but to say that it was essentially an arty from beginning to end with no truly are just i mean that's a part of romantic narrative of the arab spring but it's just i don't think is true i'll you know what's our if pressed i could name the top ten people in egypt and if our most influential in yemen one of the protest leaders there ended up winning a nobel prize this year our i would argue she was a leader even though people wouldn't necessarily talk about yemen the yemeni revolution is having readers so they're they're they just go always exert the kind of control that you would expect during a major political that you don't see that hierarchy it the parties exist it's funny because it plays out now to groups of muslim government which is very hierarchical and it's allowed them to take advantage of some of these political vacuums because they have organizations kills an infrastructure and the ability to canvas communities in the way that these

these these flat disorganized revolution original and so in countries like egypt is coming back to haunt them because the groups that did have parties before and i would argue are much stronger position revolution center question right to our collection what role is the soaps a social media playing will it replace tv advertising to any extent nothing will get replaced i mean look the millions have been spent already but at the same time i don't know of any campaign that is serious about their campaigns that ignoring socially four years ago you could soar to get away with that of the obama campaign was pretty are aggressive experiment thing they are working for that was one of the early founders of facebook and one thing they did that i think was very smart are thinking now looking back on it is they had

their social network on their website was my brock a bomb or whatever was called but one of the main purposes of that website was to get people to identify who was in their communities and meet them in person and so they were they were one of the first campaign to recognize that it's not about moving things to social media it's about integrating the online activism with awful and activism and creating a virtuous cycle between them and arm so in the two thousand and eight cycle and you could easily argue that the democrats' own twitter now you can't say that because the republicans have gotten really really sad and social media in the last few years are during the last campaign it was a campaign the internet strategist for romney for example mindy finn she's gone out and found a consultancy with a couple other a very socially savvy i am young campaigners and they've done extraordinary work teaching other campaigns have use social media effectively ron paul and he didn't need help from anyone because their campaign

from day one as god made their they're really amazing social media and so social media just a part of a campaign i mean is it going to change things what i know we have a love you we haven't had a macaque a moment like we did in the last cycle where our it didn't how many of you remember this up at the sign of the villain in the story a novel as a cannibal us we wanted to be caught saying something really really don't want to come back to haunt you and it's not the end that social media domination citizen journalists were no the camera for that matter increases the likelihood of people saying something not as a dozen chains that live with nsa but the more likely that the skin surface and then spread very quickly because every candidate gets tired and frustrated at some moment and says something they probably shouldn't the difference is now is they now have cameras trained on them all times om and so on that still probably won a major concern is how social media can affect the campaign but only time will tell as if as to whether the organizer

vince was a social media play the same kind of role it did in the in the two thousand and eight cycle for obama i am you early on in the early interview you mentioned a story about the two thousand a campaign where you use the hash tag fact checked them were able to use the crowd so to speak to come up with original sorter primary sources in order to fact check that strikes me as something that's very different from our situation you described libya where there's nobody that you know on the ground and you have to somehow build that network without they're being in each primary sources you could there's no i'm not talking about the congressional budget report you know your how you verify from over here what's going on over there and how do you know you're not working with a re tweeting out by her a propaganda

all say one thing before bach rain the winds were so ham fisted about social media was obvious when they're trying to argue they just didn't know how to do or write offs of the beer question is are these revolutionaries getting accurate information and exaggerating it or is it just one contact and it's surprising how often you think you can you can fact check it precludes the real time it's what libya the very first is the camera people didn't really believe what was that this was libya but my twitter followers who are from the region was the accents look for landmarks they look at weather patterns and what if whether they match that particular day that clip bibi from a listener calls to prayer to see if they match the time stamps worth supposedly was all sorts of other clever techniques in order to at least provide a proper context where was recorded now that we know everything about the video and not necessarily but does it give us enough conference to say this is probably worth scrutinizing

yes and you know i watch thousands of videos over the last year in the number of visits they were fake or stage i can count on one hand but isn't one cartoon characters and there'd been that few of them up they're there so many techniques you can use for scrutiny photos of photos and videos that even if you don't figure out the full context of them you know when something doesn't snow it's a lot harder when you have a person you've never met before operating under a pseudonym say there's a guy with a make a forty seven shooting at my house although there is one guy in tripoli that i just discovered like today's in the revolution who tweeted something to that effect and i'm watching him tweak those and i clearly sounds terrifying what he's tweeting but then again you know i didn't know who it was i didn't know what was going on exactly and wife weather should trust them an awesome users uploading photos he was taking notes with picks of the holes

in his house and the guy standing outside holding a very large machine gun and so yes it was possible that this guy who was geo located tripoli was playing a hoax i mean given the fact that there were tons of reports from tripoli that really there is fighting going on all over the place i can be pretty sure that this guy was being sincere his attempt to document what was happening and so very rarely is it a situation where someone is trying to perpetrate hoax argue it's much more likely that they simply don't have their information correctly and you know just the whole you know and when one person whispers into one year and then to the next and the next people who sincerely think anderson was going on pass on incorrect information and so thats more likely to happen but even in those cases where i've tweeted a video saying you know this appears the footage from yemen this week someone else will watch it and say i remember this video six months ago this is offering or they'll have some other tidbit of information and so the more people you have involve

scrutinizing the stuff the more likely you believe be figured out and so it didn't matter that at first i did i literally did not know a single person in libya by that point i knew enough to eat tunisians and egyptians were right next door who knew enough about the cauldron also the point mute ex pat libyans living in the us i can get on the phone and so you know literally i went from zero sixteen about forty eight hours building a source know i am and then once the couple of them sort of live streaming there i mean that was kind of that's when things really kicked in the high gear because un stealthy to watch in real time and people can identify yes this this has been causing and this is why some artists think about the role of social media and the perils of promises with regard to our traditional notions of a healthy lead his own expertise and authority and could you buy that to our major institutions promise those perils

of an intellectual landscape and the ever foresee a day of having a virtual congress and the point that one bottle you know i remember the very first article a public i had published after grad school it was an article about how young people were some of the very first people getting on the internet in understanding how it works in contrast with the parents and their teachers and whether or not that was going to put teachers and families in an awkward position or the children not only were technological experts were but were also able to you know shining that the things that they care about the most and show what they know about it was i wrote this in nineteen ninety five and oh it's been and spend so many ways that's how it's played out you know in many ways the internet can be a meritocracy and that people i'll build their reputations based on the quality of their ideas and there were no that doesn't stop people from getting famous from doing

jackass because and maybe never will but if you're making an effort in order to find people online certain types of expertise or engage in certain types of discourse you will find people rising to the top that probably would not be in that position of us were taking place offline i am one of the the finest experts have gotten snow in yemen's a woman named jane novak she was the first person i found on twitter who spoke english who knew everything about the country everything about the politics and culture and from day one was just covering an incredibly as just like as a policy analyst i only found out a couple weeks ago she's a housewife from new jersey and that this is something that she just became interested in a few years ago and she kind of corner the market on it because she just she cared so much there's all one of the things i did i did a lot of the last year was trying to identify weaponry so are like we saw take a picture of what

looks like a cluster munitions or something else that has been banned or controversial in libya and so we would try to figure out to make mama manufacturer country fortunate center and there is this one guy on twitter who always rise to the challenge i'll he you know there are times within forty five minutes he would say oh this'll a landmine this particular model it's manufactured in china and syria but it's based on the chinese market well you're good and so i check check you're spot on and so for much of the arab spring he was my go to guy on and weaponry and military tactics and a few other things it wasn't until after tripoli fell that i discovered that he was a fifteen year old school student was just a big fan of the literature what is that say about expertise utah with lynn so after year of violence and chaos in syria for more than a year and how social media being used today and kennedy effectively

use to buy opposition to mobilize resistance after so much time has passed now our series a very difficult situation not eat and not just in terms of the violence but also just in terms of the arab spring timeline like i constantly get wiser that egypt was able to get the world's attention so intensely and get that kind of harvard square siri would often ignored for months when many many more people are getting killed well the simple answer that is egypt had the advantage of being the only country that moment in time that was having a revolution in mainstream media had just been parked buy up missing two huge almost completely and they want to make the same mistake again with with egypt when syria's started it started somewhat slowly and when it was started things were going on and the rain they were going on in libya you're going on in yemen and so by that point he was one of half a dozen countries and it was difficult for it to get the kinds of headlines

then that the government i think was rather shrewd in how he killed people are as all clues to say this it seemed to me was rather intentional on the military's part for a very long period time to never killed more than twenty or twenty five people in there because if you can keep the death toll a fairly stable level day after day and it hasn't been the turnout after a while it can be hard for even the most passionate reporter to convince an additive has worked in yet another story on on the debt holders just kind of chugging along so when every sci major coverage of syria it's been because something wholly egregious and then just more horrific than before it happened i mean you know if i like him back in the headlines during the siege of homes are and for julia talk also destruction of the city a siege of the city for the world the caribbean and now it's mainly in the headlines because you know the un and others are dealing with that up i think in this the

syrians were never really in a position to use social media as a major organizing tool in the same way that they did for example in tunisia simply because there are more people on line tunisia with better internet access in the government never shut it down where is the us aid or shame some unusual for them when they're about to make a maneuver in particular say they shut down the internet or the fraudulent so it's so slow people can upload videos the government has also been very effective at harvard and people who shoot video many citizen journalists in syria have been killed over the last year there's this one guy i know who was killed in december names basel siad he was mainly known for being a fearless chairman illinois fixes on motorbike and those are two of the most important things they needed in order to get the footage out when he died his cousin took over he was killed when marie colvin was killed that same day last month and now another cousin the step in the pick up the camera on its extraordinary the bravery that it's required and that they're engaging to do this

and so i think social media is most important world roll is keeping the world's attention at least partially on syria and if it hadn't been for some of those citizen journalists it's rather unlikely that western journalist would have gone into homes during the siege and covered so having to think of it from both angles and if that hadn't happened it probably would be discussed at the un level right now it will one more question with so many more people participating in the news making processes in journalism blogging tweeting makes you think about certifications for doctors engineers electricians plumbers much anything you need a certification but none for news reporting journalism is their surplus for their didn't know what i would have a job i'm serious i mean where is it written that you have to check i have to have a j school diploma in order to be involved in journalism i would argue today that journalist our

profession but journalism isn't act and an act of public service you either do professionally or did you do it because it's important to your communities and not everything the border doesn't necessarily journalism carefully capable of engaging in random acts of journalism when it's nice and sell it if we had to look at some form of certification or credibility score or something that gets calculated before we take citizen journalism is seriously probably eighty percent of the media that we got out of the arab spring would have never made it public like before it would've just been circulated and circles on twitter and not made it to the mainstream media and so i am so yeah god forbid we ever have certification for people to the conductor was a bomb you know and i think it's great for you will pursue degrees in journalism but it's it's not a requirement and out so i think we have to be very careful when we think about what rules and regulations would put upon a person before we determine

that they are trying to actually toast or an orphan or anything so much as her family carvin senior strategist for social media at national public radio carbon spoke at the university of kansas dole institute of politics which institute director bill lacy on april eleventh two thousand twelve audio was provided by lawrence push you can follow andy carvin on twitter at eight carvin that's a c a r d i n he also has his own website andy carvin dot com you can follow us on twitter at to a pr info if you have comments or questions about today's k pr present drop us a line on facebook or email me my address is kate mcintyre at k you knew that's k n c i n t y r e and again

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