One of the interesting things about blogs, wikis and "new media" (aka Web 2.0) is its ability to influence dialague and narrative way beyond the number of readers of a single post. Peter Daou (now working for Hillary Clinton) wrote this up in what he called
Daou's Triangle: media reads blogs, and the politicians and parties (and their staff) read media, while blogs write about politicians and parties. There are limits to this, of course, but there are also broader applications.
One such broader application is the use of the web to engage others outside the usual power centers to either discuss the unspeakable (like an H5N1 worldwide pandemic) or influence policy. Here, we give an example in the health field. As a founder and editor of Flu Wiki, we chose to engage citizenry to help follow, learn about and prepare for an eventual flu pandemic in hopes of moving beyond that which public health authorities were doing and could do. We used the political blogs like Daily Kos as a model. At first the discussion was about who we were, and whether pseudonymous authors had any role in creating and discussing policy. Sound familiar? We drove the library sciences folks a little nuts with this (what makes an authoritative source, anyway?).
Well, a year later, we've been cited by Science, the World Bank, BBC, PBS, WHO (to name a few) and this week, by the CDC.
Above and beyond real-time information gathering and message dissemination, the social and community qualities of new media can advance health and risk communication by changing how we understand our problems and how we construct our solutions. News groups, chat rooms, and bulletin boards have been used for exchanging health information and as online support groups since the earliest days of the web. Today's Web 2.0 tools that leverage and harness the "knowledge of the crowd" offer great potential for solving our most difficult public health problems and building and empowering communities of change. One great example is FluWiki, whose stated purpose is "to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic, [which is] a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies."
Controlling and mitigating public health emergencies, especially those that are the size and scale of an influenza pandemic, will absolutely require the active engagement and participation of the public and all sectors of society. New media efforts to engage and galvanize the public like FluWiki, Green Hammer, and the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog are critical to CDC's ability to prepare for and respond to an influenza pandemic and to other possible public health emergencies.
It's beginning to be recognized throughout the establishment that you can't ignore new media any more, whether it's YouTube, the blogs or MySpace, not if you want to reach people. And there are times the blogs can drive the discussion, be it about politics, health issues or human rights.
In a perfect world, this might not be needed. But given the government we have, we're not about to stop. OTOH, for those that need the authorities to vouch for the new media model before believing in it, that's becoming more and more common, hence all the stories about bloggers over the last year and the focus on whether their support is "worth" anything, and "who's won". Kos has written about this before; it's a process, not a scorecard. That applies to more than just this election and more than just politics; herein is just one more example.
Update [2006-10-15 15:37:46 by DemFromCT]:Here's wiki partner
Revere's take at Effect Measure on the same story.
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