I heard an interesting story today: in the United Kingdom, a lawyer issued a court summons via Facebook.
This happened in early March this year, when a solicitor was finding it hard to get ahold of a debtor who needed to attend court and answer some questions about their finances. After exhausting most traditional measures of contacting someone, the lawyer recalled that a Supreme Court in Australia was able to grant permission for the social networking website to be used for serving legal documents.
The Internet has always been a kind of vast, lawless country. There’s no law-governed body in existence policing the corners of the web to arrest people who commit wrongdoings; if you do happen to commit an Internet-related crime, you don’t pay for it by going to Internet jail. You’re governed by the country where you committed your crime in, and even then the law hasn’t caught up with the technology. Most countries don’t even have any solid laws regarding crimes committed on the web and are still making them up.
I’m not here to talk about legalities with you, though. This particular instance makes me wonder about the versatility of social media, and how we use it to communicate and conduct our everyday lives.
There seems to be no limit in the reach of websites like Facebook and Twitter – people regularly live-tweet when they attend landmark events, like concerts or fan meetings. It is possible to interview celebrities and artists on a social networking platform, live-chat style. At the rate things are going, we may someday see people conducting lectures completely on Twitter.
The idea is not without its pitfalls. Real journalism requires fact-checking and consulting with legitimate sources. To say that everything you see on Facebook is true is definitely a long stretch of the imagination. Every other day, a person’s name becomes a top trending topic because it’s been reported that they’ve passed on when they haven’t. Social media is one of the fastest ways to get a message out into the public mainstream, but the fact remains that some of these messages are part if not total fabrication. Sure, the news is real-time and up-to-the-minute, but is it guaranteed fact?
Anyone with a smartphone can be a potential journalist: this has become increasingly apparent, especially in countries where conventional news sources are gagged by the government. At the same time, any Tom, Dick, or Arnold can upload photos of, say, the earthquake in Japan and label them as something that happened in Taiwan, potentially causing mass panic and confusion.
People talk about how social media is replacing traditional journalism every day; about how it is no longer necessary to turn to trusted media sources for the news that comes with your cup of coffee in the morning. Many still claim that the age of the newspaper has come and gone, as more and more people turn to their laptops and phones for the latest developments. While that may be true, most are still wary of the things they come across on Twitter and still turn to places like CNN and The New York Times for the hard facts. So really, it’s just the ‘paper’ part of the newspaper industry that’s a foregone conclusion – which can be nothing but a good thing, considering the state of the environment today.
Me, I only trust the professionals. Where do you get your news from?
Later,
Andy “Newsworthy” Jenkins
