Photo by Aram Boghosian/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Like many people who live in a time zone an hour or so behind the East Coast, I found myself awake late Thursday night, following the terrifying events that unfolded in Boston. I watched and listened as the seemingly isolated, if tragic, shooting of an MIT police officer quickly became linked to a car chase, a shootout, a trail of unexploded ordinance, and a manhunt. And I saw traditional media and the crowdsourced news sources of the internet try to make sense of it all.
Where journalism is concerned, I’m quite a Luddite. I tend to eschew Twitter, and prior to Thursday, I never once consulted Reddit for breaking news. I believe that caution, careful confirmation of new developments and healthy skepticism are the best components of conscientious news reportage; characteristics that the breathless DIY journalism of social networks tends to have in short supply.
In the early going though, it was clear that the internet and the traditional media were each equally clueless. In that vacuum of hard information, my Facebook feed was full of friends, many of whom I hadn’t been in touch with in weeks, months, or years, all pooling their resources to make any sense at all. Anyone who knew someone in or from the Boston area was weighing in to comfort, commiserate, and offer what little information they had. There were three constants in everyone’s comments: fear, confusion, and universal disdain for CNN.
That was the positive side: Using technology to comfort and inform each other. Unfortunately, it became clear over the course of a couple hours that as in any crisis, a seemingly plausible explanation can quickly gain traction, even if it’s not true.
Which brings us to Reddit.
After a couple of hours, friends of mine began to point me in Reddit’s direction, claiming, with various degrees of amazement, that the collective wisdom of its user base had positively identified the suspects hours before law enforcement and the news media. These friends, and Reddit, turned out to be completely wrong. The names of these supposed suspects (which I won’t repeat here) were not those of the now infamous Tsaranev brothers. Not that it mattered. The individuals fingered by Reddit users were trending on Twitter. Not one print or broadcast outlet that I was following at the time (the local Boston ABC affiliate, NBC news, and the Boston Globe for the most part) elected to publicly name the suspects in a similar manner at that time. Indeed, as of 5:00 AM central time on Friday, when I finally went to bed, the suspects were still being referred to in the national media by the colors of their baseball hats.
Over the course of the evening, and into the wee hours, I reposted a lot of information on my Facebook wall. It goes without saying that Facebook isn’t a journalistic outlet by any stretch of the imagination, but I did my best to cherry-pick the best information at hand. The false Reddit accusations didn’t pass my own personal smell test, so I chose not to share them. There are other, smaller details that I passed along that turned out to be wrong: issues of chronology, details of the firefight, and the involvement of a naked man in the back of a squad car. I felt that if multiple news organizations, all staffed with fact checkers and editors felt that they didn’t know the identities of the suspects, I was pretty sure I didn’t either.
The internet is a reflection of the best and worst of our impulses in a crisis. Boundless goodwill and and earnest desire to help our fellow citizens goes hand in hand with a desire to create answers and explanations for ourselves to provide some measure of certainty from chaos as quickly as possible. The instantaneous dissemination of information makes us feel empowered, capable, and stable. But it’s not a substitute for expertise.
Just because we can know everything doesn’t mean that we do.
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