Well yes, as said, this is the post with my notes on Barons to Bloggers, which was of course a cracking good read. Or at least part 1. Part 2 is still being mentally digested.
On the introduction:
Donald McDonald comments that the media has always been in a state of transition. The free press, to be brief, is a good thing. The introduction notes that “no substantial famine has ever occurred in a country with a free press”. Now, this is probably true, and I have no substantial issue with the claim itself but I do wonder a little bit about the assumption of a causal effect between free press and positive social outcomes like, maybe, not starving. Not to be dismissive of the importance of free press to the democratic way of life, but the climate of politics that leads to famine and Generally Bad Things Happening is also perhaps the kind of government that would tend towards not having issues with stifling the freedom of expression of its citizenry. Just a thought, perhaps freedom of press and lack of famine is a little more co-incidental than causal. Anyway.
Liked the point that freedom of press is only available to those who own one. It’s a nice extension, too, that blogging means that everybody owns a press of their own and media tools are falling into public hands. Implicit in this introduction is a utopian idea of information technology, in which it can be used for the promotion of democracy and news-dissemination (both Good Things). Instead of a top-down vertical news dissemination, the shape is now sort of horizontal; instead of few-to-many dissemination, it is many-to-many now. In the past, news was a lecture, now it is more of a discussion between peers.
McDonald does not, however, say the traditional news is going away, merely that it is changing. Though their “hegemony is threatened”, the reputation of traditional journalists is still quite important.
The introduction also points out that objectivity is no longer as important an aspect of news media than it once was, or at least the illusion of objectivity; it seems to me, perhaps, that diversity of opinion is more important than neutrality of opinion.
Notes on Nullius in Verba (which means “Don’t trust anyone’s word”; things always sound much more weighty when they’re written in latin)
There’s lots of democracy in the world. This is, again, a Good Thing. This article makes the distinction between hardware and software; hardware being an analogy for infrastructure, software being an analogy for that which utilises it. It’s a nice analogy.
In this, nations are used as an analogy for the media and the democratization of the media. Weblogs are the center of media democracy, with wikis, RSS feed and Google (which isn’t infallible, and needs the use of people who are discerning and able to digest and interpret information).
While individual web-logs might not have many readers, when you add all the readers of blogs up, it comes to a huge “audience”, who are able to participate. And this is the nature of democracy.
An issue, however, with the diversity of news is the problem of he “Daily Me”, in which only information the reader is interested in is fed into their proverbial inbox. A problem with this, perhaps, is the matter of the “public interest” versus “stuff the public is interested in”, leading to a glut in news which is entertaining, certainly (like Gwen Stefani’s latest offspring being named Zuma, which is also the name of a fun computer game where you shoot gems with a cannon), but not necessarily “public interest” and therefore offers little benefit in terms of offering a greater understanding of the world around us (like the Russia/Georgia conflict; it just seems so far away, but lots of people are being killed, it’s probably the sort of thing we should find important). What I think of is Robert Putnam’s argument in Bowling Alone, where he blames a decline in social capital in American society on polarisation by the media; the Daily Me phenomenon is, perhaps, taking it to its greatest extreme, in which news is entertainment based and unlikely to offer any sense of community building. On the other hands, bloggers do form communities, and these are certainly socially valid in terms of promoting democracy; so I suppose the argument goes both ways.
And we’re moving from being tool users to tool managers, where we control the means of syndication. Again, this is quite a utopian perspective, but it does raise some valid concerns about user-selected self-interested (for want of a better term) content.
