New Media Research Studio

Number One – Twitter

Twitter is possibly the most interesting platform of coverage used during spectrial because it was used many ways.  Looking at its usage from most primary to secondary sources shows how information about the trial was proliferated within just one platform.  Most primary of sources, Peter Sunde, one of the defendants used twitter to make (sarcastic) comments like “The prosecutor just got owned in #spectrial.”  While these comments didn’t add much to the factual reporting of the trial, it did give a unique sense of how the defendant was feeling during the trial. 

Twitter was also used to translate the audio feed from the courtroom from Swedish to English.  Although this was interesting and valuable, it’s also highly problematic from a journalistic sense. One person has tremendous power over what gets translated, how it is translated, and even the medium itself makes it difficult with it’s character limit per tweet.  Despite its limitations, in cases where there is little other information and little coverage from more legitimate sources, such as during this trial, this is valuable tool. 

Finally, twitter was also used to share information that users deemed pertinent to the trial.  By using the tag “#spectrial” in their tweets, those posts we aggregated and more and more information became available to people who were interested in the trial.

Number Two – Wikipedia

Information about the trial was added to this wikipedia entry throughout the course of the trial.  I think this format of reporting is particularly interesting because it creates a permanent record of a story in progress while it’s in progress.  Because many people can be a part of the entry (hopefully) many different biases will be represented, leading to more objective journalism.  This is a utopian view of wikipedia, clearly, but in order for something like this to be possible there need to be positive example of it working.  I’m not sure if this particular entry reflects the diversity of opinions on the issue, but it’s timely coverage, and objective writing style is valuable, especially because many other “news” sources covering this case have obvious bias.

Read More »