A dispatch from last weekend. (Photo: WMATA)

Last Friday I spoke with Brian Anderson, WMATA's new social media manager, about how his first week was going. We discussed a lot, including his desire to cover the big track work affecting Metro this week — multiple stations closed down to allow for track work, and buses would close the gap between those closed stations for the first time ever during a standard two-day weekend. Anderson told me he hoped to journey out to the sites and take some video and broadcast the work to Metro riders to give them a better sense of why they might be experiencing such delays and changes on their weekend travel.

Metro has been active in promoting Anderson's photos, notes, and as of 6 p.m. last night, the first of his videos through their Metro Forward campaign, the "meat" of which WMATA chief spokesperson Dan Stessel said would begin this weekend. Here's the first of Anderson's video dispatches from the Twinbrook station along the Red Line:

All of this plays into what I'm beginning to call the Metro Noise War. A chorus of critics has arisen online in new, passionate, and vocal force, making countless jabs at the institution whenever response is not as immediate or adequate as they'd like. A part of the recent volume is because critics know that Metro's listening in some form these days, with new staff devoted to monitoring and engaging Metro customers more dynamically than in the past. As I covered in my piece Friday, the transit organization began speaking up via social media to its customers more than ever earlier this summer, when Stessel joined WMATA and started writing back. The whole philosophy of Metro Forward seems to be about counteracting the negative noise online and promoting the $6 billion going back into Metro's trains, escalators, tracks, and more over the next half decade.

What we have is a war of the narratives, and the new presence of Brian Anderson on WMATA's PR team is a big shot fired back at the noise of online critics. As General Manager Richard Sarles said in his six-month report recently, the organization is prioritizing customers in a new way and has doubled their Twitter and Facebook audience in 2011. He told me he hopes to integrate Facebook into Metro's social media efforts more. The new photos of weekend track work are, yes, on that very Metro Forward Facebook page that yes, does exist. Anderson encourages people to "like" the page frequently in his recent updates, in hopes of building up a following.

Let's consider the Metro Forward Facebook page. It sports around 550 fans so far and features many recent Anderson updates on the Red Line track work and shuttle bus system that he added over the weekend. "We eagerly looked to capture how the second most ridden rapid transit system in the United States rebuilds, rehabilitates and refreshes itself, one weekend at a time," Anderson wrote in a Metro Forward Facebook note. "Then it was all up to us to capture a piece of the many jobs to be completed during a weekend that kept trains off the tracks between Rockville and Bethesda, allowing uninterrupted work to take place by crews who do the craft they know how to do best."

The photos Anderson posted do illustrate what happened in a rough sense. There's two pictures from the Red Line track work, and more interestingly, seven photos of the shuttle bus rerouting that Metro customers experienced. The photos show signs that direct customers to the free shuttle buses as well as the ambassadors that guided Metro customers on the platform to the appropriate bus areas. The first video he posted offers an informative look at what a ballast tamper does to the Metro tracks. It's useful to see the efforts Metro talks about from a person on the ground.

Yet these efforts also speak to the sanitized public face that Metro hopes to show its customers. The service wants to project transparency and clarity like never before, and in doing so, exert a narrative of control. The Metro narrative crafts a story in which the organization's staff is pulling itself out of a disjointed past with precision and control and a guided, strategic plan for track and escalator work that will remove the nuisances we've faced. In that narrative, they're wise, credible, human, but inherently hopeful and on the right track (so to speak). As in every good public relations team, Anderson and Stessel want to craft the story and emphasize the positive.

The contrarian view is that Metro is a perpetual screw-up — that the trains are always late, that the communication efforts are hardly ever enough and are often off-base or obtuse, that the system deteriorates, that the reform efforts are maddening, that the idea of "strategy" at Jackson Graham is the equivalent of a fairy-tale myth. The attacks are often biting, caustic, and frustrated, and the intense bitterness that characterizes some of the jibes lacks as much realistic perspective as constant Metro cheerleading.

Which narrative is true? That's increasingly becoming harder to tell as the Metro Noise War escalates. Both and neither, to some extent. Metro's social outreach has its virtues but scrutiny is vital; public relations can, as many critics would offer, take the form of propaganda. The same noise war emerged recently with the news that Metro's biggest union won a raise. The narrative espoused by WMATA was drastically different from what the union offered.

But ultimately, I believe more information is good, and I laud the increased information across the board, whether coming from Metro or from the horde of riders sharing news online. Blowing out these scraps of information with greater context and clarification is what's ultimately needed and is the big challenge in this new environment. More is better but what's best is depth.