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Scenario: mobs of Freeporters


Notizen:

The basic idea of the Freeporter is that every mobile phone user is a potential reporter of events as they happen. With a contemporary handset you can simply speak an audio comment about an event, you can take a picture or even record a video of a scene. A GPS device could automatically annotate your current position so that the report would automatically be placed in a location context. With the push of a button, the recorded audio and video files could be uploaded to the Internet---for everyone to see and hear.
While such reports taken in isolation would hardly reach our expectations of a well-investigated journalistic report, it could be the ubiquity of thousands of these tiny bits of reports which could make a difference. The complex task of making a news report from a professional point of view could be divided into smaller parts. For example, a first person could take pictures of one scene, a second person could take pictures of another scene and a third one could look at both perspectives and draw a conclusion. This would turn the production of news into an open process in the public interest, where everybody could participate and present his or her point of view and draw own conclusions.
If such a grass roots news reporting community would emerge with enough participating amateur reporters, there would be several advantages from a consumer's perspective. First, there would be a gain in topicality as I already pointed out. News reports could be as fast as instant messaging is. Live TV broadcasts cannot compare to this scenario, because they are rather the exception. Live TV broadcasts can only be made for a few popular events: they do not scale with the number of events that happen.
But---which takes us to the second advantage---the scenario of many mobile reporters scales well in topicality. Another aspect of scalability involves the relevance of reports. On the one hand, the news network could be used to publish and read about family events which are only relevant to a very small group of people. On the other hand, it could be used for reports of global interest, about events which everybody has to know about.
The third advantage is about objectivity of the reports. Although a single hobby-freeporter is likely to fail in providing all sides of a story, if several reports would be combined like the pieces of a jigsaw, the development of a news article would become an open and democratic process.
The possibility for an individual personalisation of a news broadcast is the fourth advantage. The traditional media organisations have certain target groups for which they produce reports. This limitation could also be overcome.