Gene Park: Your #InstaWeek
People are documenting everything on social media these days.
The Mana March protest against GMOs in Kauai. Big waves on the North Shore. Protestors at the Christopher Deedy murder trial. Traffic jams. Shark sightings. Film festivals. The best sunsets.
In the news business, we call this “user-generated content,” or UGC.
I’ll be perusing social media to offer you a comprehensive look at what was going on in Hawaii for the past week, with added context written for each photo. This will include Twitter and Instagram. If you search in Instagram for #Hawaii, more than 4 million posts show up. Instagram just recently announced a benchmark , with 60 percent of them outside the U.S. We hope to galvanize and harness some of that energy in Hawaii.
Social media allows everyone their own broadcasting platform to showcase their thoughts, beliefs, ideas and principles. I believe there’s tremendous value in this.
And let’s not forget, , a piece that revealed abuse of the multi-billion dollar charitable organization started by Bernie Pauahi Bishop, was the most earth-shattering news story in modern Hawaii, and that was, at its very core, user-generated content. The piece, which fundamentally changed the way Kamehameha Schools and Bishop Estate were run, was submitted to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1997. “It was the story that rocked Hawaii,” in 2001.
Sure, these users were prominent members of the Hawaii community, including University of Hawaii law Professor Randall Roth, the late former federal Judge and former Office of Hawaiian Affairs Trustee . But that doesn’t change the fact that they weren’t working journalists. Paired with former Gov. Ben Cayetano, Roth and Heen offer tremendous credibility to the anti-rail movement and the pending lawsuit against the project.
Instagram pictures and 140-character tweets may not seem to be comparable. But Twitter and Facebook played in 2010’s Arab Spring. Similar, sophisticated news judgment, long used by editors in journalism, must now be applied to social media, and I aim to uphold the old-school principles with these new tools.
If you wish to be featured in our week in review, simply post with the tried-and-true #becivil hashtag, and I’ll take a look. The first, new version of this new #InstaWeek in review will be posted tomorrow. Until then, #becivil.
