What’s Happening?

A key attribute of a democracy is the belief that information flows to the citizenry must be ubiquitous, unfiltered, and continuous. This requirement must be executed by institutions that have a devotion to that enterprise. In the early days of the democracy, newspapers played one role in “keeping government officials honest.” Later, the development of quasi-independent government agencies totally devoted to providing objective, accurate information about the economy and the larger society spurred the information feedback loop.

We’re entering a new era, in my belief, in the nature of the feedback loop. New digital sources of data are now providing information on what’s happening. Sometimes it goes under the moniker of “what’s trending,” based either on Twitter traffic on given hashtags or on YouTube viewing counts. Some news commentators appear to treat the information in the same spirit that they treat a report on UN-coordinated cease-fire talks among several countries or the daily movement of the stock market.

If one reviews the history of survey research, there are three distinct streams of development – the use of surveys in journalism, the use of surveys in marketing, and the use of surveys for social scientific research. The use of surveys in journalism was a logical evolution of so-called “man-in-the-street” interviews (sorry, that’s what they called it at the time). These were viewed as useful supplements to a journalist’s investigation of some social or economic phenomenon of news interest. Such articles often began with the discussion of the event/status, then interweaved quotations from “real people” about how the phenomenon affected their lives. Such a literary form attempted to increase the “human interest” in the news. Of course, the journalist had complete control over choice of what “man-in-the-street” quotations to use, and thereby, what conclusions to prime among readers.

If one man-in-the-street interview was good, many were even better. Naïve assembly of many interviews arose, appearing to be more a “survey” of opinion than a single case-study. The news poll was born.

In a way focusing on trending tweets and popular YouTube videos is a modern version of the “man-in-the-street” interview. Some are presented as evidence of widely-shared attitudes in the public. They are compared to other trends to prompt conclusion about whether one issue is more important than another issue. They are often used as evidence that a specific event is important to the society.

Others are just silly and humorous diversions from the dreadful news of wars, abject poverty, murder, mayhem, and sadness.

What’s different about the “what’s trending” development is that it often doesn’t start with any hard news initiated by a journalist. The “man-in-the-street” is not an enriching feature of a hard news story; it is the story. The start and end of the story are popular hashtags and uploaded videos.

Because tracking hashtags is easier than doing man-in-the-street interviews, I suspect we will see more of this way of answering the question of “what’s happening.” I fear, however, that the citation of numbers (“100,000’s of uses of the hashtag in the last 12 hours,” “750,000 views of the video”) might be misinterpreted as having a value beyond what it deserves.

Every once in awhile, I’d like a commentator to tell us that, just because a few hundred thousand people are visibly behaving in some way, it may not tell us much of anything about all 323 million US residents or all 7 billion world residents. It’s quite frightening to consider the possibility that such information might be the only source for an informed citizenry to assess their welfare.