It’s nice to feel part of the outsider avant-garde, on the with-it, trend-setting leading edge, the toast of your peers, and at the same time have the respect and authority of an established position in a tried-and-true social structure.  The one you are replacing.  Or co-opting.  Whose offices you are eyeing.

“Social media”, which is something like millions of networked typewriters all whacking away together, with some of them even talking to each other, takes place on the internet, and has attracted something of a vocal following.

It has evangelists, experts, proponents, advocates, gurus, mavens, divas and people developing their “personal brand”, all claiming themselves to be involved in the leading edge of human communication.  New media.  Nearly instant.  Seeking validation, just because it is new.

They set themselves against established “journalism”, whatever that is, the stuff in the space between ads, printed on paper, the free press, champions of the down-trodden, or upholders of the pillars, whatever we are going to call it.  Newspapers, magazines.  Print.  Where Pulitzers are found.  Old media.  And a bit slow.  Needing no validation, but maybe an infusion.

What separates the two, apart from medium?  I have to introduce a concept, sometimes honored in the breach or via lip-service, sometimes hacked out in Latin letters on granite blocks in universities, and that concept we can call “journalistic standards”.  It is a class in schools for journalism.

I really don’t care if there is the equivalent of the doctor’s Hippocratic oath, though it would be cool to insert some Latin words here.  The thing is, the traditional writers who tell people about the events of the day figured out a way to build credibility, using something called objectivity, and even honesty.  Whatever they are, or were.

So, old-media, new-media.  The first takes some training, the second, anybody can do it.  Even your “average citizen”.  He needs a computer or phone, and an internet connection, but not much more.  Certainly no ink, printing press, or chain of command.  And he would enjoy a bit of validation, because we all like to feel good about ourselves, so, maybe, if it is not a stretch, the average citizen would love to whisper “journalist” when contemplating the blank space for occupation on application forms.

Now, about velocity.  Which travels faster, a shout “fire!” in a theater, or a smile?  Anxiety, or wisdom?  Gossip, or truth?  It is the hysteria which runs.  Wisdom walks.  Hysteria, by the way, is contagious.  Mobs illustrate this.

What do we get when we have many nice citizens with internet connections, and an emergency situation suddenly happens?  You get #mumbai.

If tweets could trample, my god.  People proud of themselves acting as “citizen journalists” twittering the uninformed rubbish of tv newsreaders to the waiting world as if it were gospel truth.  And then “shouting” (ok, twittering) at other “citizen journalists” about how they had it all wrong.  If you were reading that #mumbai thread you could not avoid a headache, and the certain knowledge that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.

A month later, what do we have?  Scholarly papers on the birth of “citizen journalism” in India.  God save us from “citizen journalists” and the academics who extol them.

Imagine a hyper-connected world where everybody is a “citizen journalist”, everybody has a twitter account, and everybody is twittering about the emergency hapening down their street.  The internet will start to smoke, and anxiety will be the diet of us all.