By Linda Forrest
Earlier this week, TechCrunch readers were given a rare treat – the chance to engage in a public forum with a technology icon: Sean Parker. One of the founders of Napster, founder at Plaxo, a former advisor to and the first president of Facebook (who bears little physical resemblance to Justin Timberlake who played an, according to Parker, historically-inaccurate, party animal version of him in last year’s Oscar-nominated film, The Social Network), and now director at Spotify. In short, Sean Parker has been an architect of many of the “large-scale societal shifts” of the last 15 years.
So, it was with great interest that I clicked on (and subsequently retweeted) the following Tweet:
Our Francis Moran, a seasoned reporter, wrote a post on our blog back in 2008 entitled “The interview’s never over” in which he cautioned readers about the perils of gotcha journalism, how interviewees can stray from approved messaging when the interaction between reporter and subject turns casual.
At the time of his post, Twitter had about 200,000 active users per week, while Facebook had 100 million users. Compare those figures with today, where Twitter now boasts 100 million active users and Facebook touts 800 million users. In other words, the echo chamber of the social web is exponentially more powerful than it was just three years ago. That social media platforms are so very pervasive in our daily lives gives us the ability to interact with one another on a previously unheard of scale. How media is generated, distributed, consumed, passed on… all of these activities have been radically altered by the public’s adoption of social media and its willingness to communicate on these channels.
And so, when TechCrunch posted an article with the (in keeping with good Huffington Post-style tradition) salacious title, Sean Parker On Facebook Privacy: “There Is Good Creepy, And There is Bad Creepy,” the interview subject himself responded in the comments.
In the age of social media the interview is never really over, as evidenced by Parker’s calling out of the editors for naming the article based on a flippant comment.
“This is why business leaders don’t typically joke around about their own products in public. I guess I’ll go back to being serious,” said Parker in a Facebook comment on the article.
As I said at the beginning, Parker engaged with regular folk who commented on the article, providing rare public access to a technology entrepreneur of his renown. His comments ranged from petty name-calling to intelligent discourse on the nature of privacy.
This scenario brings several points to mind:
1. The media doesn’t always get it right
Take it from someone who sends media materials with the right information out to the media, only to have incorrect information reported. This week I had correspondence with an editor who had interviewed my client send me copy for approval that had not only the executive’s name incorrect, but misspelled the company name throughout. Parker himself commented on the inaccuracies – accidental and otherwise – that exist about him in the public realm:
I have a largely fabricated, exaggerated, and distorted version of my life story broadcast to the public. And not by sites like Facebook or Twitter, but by good old-fashioned mass media. If anything social media is my only salvation from the tyranny of media that I don’t control; it’s the only chance I have to tell my own story, lest it be told inaccurately (or worse, maliciously) by others. This is why I’m suddenly engaging so deeply with social media–I want to reclaim control over my life. I would much prefer a “candid version of my life story” to a Hollywood screenwriter’s dramatized version thereof.
2. Social media has democratized editorial coverage
It used to be that if inaccuracies were printed about someone, it was an onerous, elongated, laborious undertaking to correct them. And in most cases, the toothpaste was out of the tube. But, most if not all traditional media do have a mechanism for retracting or correcting wrong or misleading information. In our digital age, edits can be made to text instantaneously. Interview subjects can post comments the moment the publish button is pushed. Most profoundly, no longer is the editor the only one with editorial control over content: whether you’re Joe Blow or a billionaire iconoclast, you have the power to affect editorial content, through social media, self-publishing, or other digital means.
3. You never know who is reading your stuff online
I am willing to bet that the first few John Q. Citizen commenters on the article had no expectation that the article’s subject would be reading – and in some cases responding to – Facebook comments on an online article. This is a good lesson that you never know who is reading material you post online. It could be your childhood friend you haven’t talked to in 20 years, your prospective employer, your mother, your idol, potential customer, business partner… Don’t say anything in a public forum that you wouldn’t want anyone in these categories to read, because they can. And while today’s newspaper is tomorrow’ bird-cage lining, things written online live forever.
Image: TechCrunch
