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are conversations, as the Cluetrain Manifesto authors have
noted, then journalism the information people need to manage
their lives will increasingly be part of those conversations.
Newsmakers need to understand that the swirling eddies of
news are not tiny pools on the shoreline. Information is an
ocean, and newsmakers can no longer control the tide as easily
as they once did.
So they must face at least three new rules of public life.
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we the media
First, outsiders of all kinds can probe more deeply into
newsmakers businesses and affairs. They can disseminate what
they learn more widely and more quickly. And it s never been
easier to organize like-minded people to support, or denounce, a
person or cause. The communications-enabled grassroots is a
formidable truth squad.
Second, insiders are part of the conversation. Information
no longer leaks. It gushes, through firewalls and other barriers,
via instant messages, emails, and phone calls.
Third, what gushes forth can take on a life of its own, even
if it s not true.
spreading the word
As noted earlier, modern communications have become his-
tory s greatest soapbox, gossip factory, and, in a very real sense,
spreader of genuine news. At one time, an individual with an
issue had few options. He could stand on the corner and rant, or
post a sign, or write a newsletter, or pen a letter to the editor.
Today, if his argument is sufficiently moving and/or backed up
with facts, the tools at his disposal can make it a global phe-
nomenon. The autonomous linking machine consisting of
people who care enough to spread the word, plus new tools
such as RSS, which widely disseminate what they write
launches into action. And how the word does spread.
Even before the Web rose to prominence, the online world
was making companies pay attention. In 1994, Usenet, the
system of Internet discussion groups, helped teach a lesson to
Intel, which makes most of the processors that are the central
brains of personal computers. News of the Pentium bug, a
math-calculation flaw in a version of the Pentium processor,
first spread via Usenet before it was picked up in the popular
press. At great expense financially and to its reputation, Intel
had to replace many of the flawed chips. Our immediate lesson
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the gates come down
was from that moment onwards, you cannot ignore that
medium [the Internet] and that that medium was going to get
more and more important at setting opinions, an Intel execu-
tive told the CNET news service in 1999.68
A decade after the Intel debacle came another relatively
trivial, but still revealing, example. In early 2004, with great
fanfare, including a Super Bowl commercial, Pepsi announced a
free songs promotion. Buyers of Pepsi could look at the
underside of the bottle cap and, about one out of three times,
win a free song download from the Apple iTunes music web
site. But someone noticed a flaw in the bottle design. He or she
figured out how to tilt the unopened bottle just so and discover
whether the bottle contained the code for the song. Once upon a
time that information would have remained within a small com-
munity of people, but in the Internet age, that information was
almost instantly available to anyone with an Internet connec-
tion in the form of a document titled How to never lose Pepsi s
iTunes giveaway. 69 And there was nothing Pepsi could do
about it. If someone knows something in one place, everyone
who cares about that something will know it soon enough.
Consider a far more profound example, a case with true
life-or-death implications: the SARS epidemic that began in the
Chinese province of Guangdong in November 2002. The repres-
sive government, accustomed to controlling the news, at first
didn t allow the medical community to tell anyone what was
happening. But in early February 2003, the news began to leak
out anyway, not through newspapers or television or official
announcements, but through SMS, or short messaging through
mobile phones, a modern form of word-of-mouth. And the
word was grim: people were sick and in some cases dying from
a particularly virulent form of pneumonia. That led to some
news coverage, probably much earlier than might have hap-
pened had the people not literally taken news delivery into their
own hands.70
Once SARS became a household word and panic began to
set in, SMS became a medium of choice for the government, too.
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we the media
Hong Kong authorities used it to attempt, not very successfully,
to dampen unfounded rumors that were spreading on the
Internet.71
Now add moblogging and its kin to the equation the
use of camera-equipped mobile devices by just about everyone,
in a world where we must assume that people are constantly
taking pictures in public places.
Newsmakers, especially Hollywood stars and other celebri-
ties, already loathe the paparazzi photographers who follow
them around and snap pictures in unguarded moments. What
will happen when 10 average citizens aim their phones at the
stars and zap the images they take to their friends or to web
sites? Still images are only the beginning; video cameras will
become part of our phones soon enough. The paparazzi have
better cameras and are better picture-takers, but the swarms of
amateur paparazzi will satisfy most of the public s insatiable
hunger for news about their favorite celebrities. And for the
people who live in the public eye, that eye will never blink when
they re outside of their homes.
That, of course, is a relatively trivial example of what s
coming. Camera phones and other carry-everywhere photo-
graphic and video devices may give people powerful tools to
prevent crime; as CNN reported in 2003, a 15-year-old boy
snapped a camera-phone picture of a would-be abductor,
helping the police find the man.72 These devices will also greatly
accelerate the way we document history.
As of early May 2004, it was still unclear who took the dig-
ital photographs of Americans abusing Iraqi prisoners in Abu
Ghraib prison, but their escape into the public sphere was
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