A future for the media?

[Fifthfiend]

Originally Posted by Lord Bitememan

I wouldn't dismiss this flash out of hand. True, a lot of what we saw was just speculation and a bit of falating of a popular company, but this flash actually hit several kew trends in media squarely on the head.

First, there's the issue of the internet and blogger challenge to the established media. Nowhere was this more evident that the 2004 US presidential election where we saw the bloggers actually discredit a network news story and supercede print and broadcast media in framing and agenda-setting. This is totally unprecedented, and more than likely there's more where that came from. More and more the bloggers are framing the news, setting the agenda, and attracting legions of readers who are disaffected with the current media establishment.

Second, and drawing very closely off the first point, is a severe deficit of trust between the public and the media. For years the media has been dogged by allegations that it is biased or even a propaganda machine. What is striking is that these allegations come as often from the left as from the right. The right has long lodged complaints about a "liberal media elite," but on the flipside the left has also, and simultaneously, accused the media of being a propaganda machine for the state (especially during the Iraq war) and of selectively reporting to suit the interests of the establishment. Both sides have turned to the internet to see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear, and network and print news have been suffering as a result.

Additionally, the internet as a whole has been supplanting traditional forms of information and entertainment beyond just the news. The internet has become almost the primary source for research material for college essays, now takes up (among certain demographics) more time than television viewing for entertainment, and provides alternative forms of access to literature with the advent of online books. The internet is simply becoming more popular than the television and the printed page, and it only makes sense that the newsmedia would similarly feel the effects.

On top of all this, you have the fusion of information and entertainment. This is, quite possibly, reflective of the diminishing attention spans of the public, or maybe just a symptom of the increasing involved lives people lead. Nevertheless, shallow sensationalism grabs the viewers, lengthy, in-depth reporting does not. It's sad, but true.

So, I'm really wondering here if this is all that far-fetched. The truth is, if you're worried that people aren't going to see dissenting perspectives in the future, the fact is they don't, for the most part, now. If you're a Democrat, CNN and MSNBC will never disappoint at showing you what you want to see, and if you are a Republican, there's good old Fox News. If you're worried that you will be at the mercy of amatuerish bloggers for your news in the future; 1. who says you aren't now 2. who says the executive producers of the network news stories are any better? In either instance you're at Editor in Chief of a paper who decides his paper isn't far enough to the whatever end of the political spectrum, or the executive producer of a story who doesn't bother to vett the sources he uses.

I don't think that this flash is all that far off from what we're living in now. I'd certainly say that the potential for it is already there, and maybe a bit of the practice of it as well.

That's all fine and well except

1. the blogs are largely dependent on newspapers and other reporting media for their content. Blogs wouldn't have much to talk about if nobody was breaking actual news.

2. Blog hyperventilations on kerning wouldn't have mattered for shit if they hadn't been repeated and amplified across the length and width of the boring old newspapers and television networks.

3. In fact like 90% of what you've said above are lines of argument that have been cycled extensively throughout the boring old media of print and broadcast, which goes to show just how not gone their influence is.

4. None of that has much to do with that flash, which somehow imagines that Google clipping information will somehow cause the NYT to cease to exist. Which is fucking stupid because the NYT will continue to exist or not depending on its ability to gather and convey new information, not whether or how it slaps that information together.

I mean did hip-hop and record sampling mean that nobody plays guitar or drums anymore? No it means that the legal structure got reworked so that the people who sample have to pay fucking money to the people who actually played the guitars and drums.

[Lockeownzj00]

1. the blogs are largely dependent on newspapers and other reporting media for their content. Blogs wouldn't have much to talk about if nobody was breaking actual news.

You forget blogs aren't all Joe Schmoe sitting in their living room--who says reporters can't blog? Oh wait--they do. And further, who says an independent, digital-only reporter can't blog?

2. Blog hyperventilations on kerning wouldn't have mattered for shit if they hadn't been repeated and amplified across the length and width of the boring old newspapers and television networks.

3. In fact like 90% of what you've said above are lines of argument that have been cycled extensively throughout the boring old media of print and broadcast, which goes to show just how not gone their influence is.

I would hesitate to say that. Take Digg for example--before there were even print or digital articles on it, I was already observing the social spread of news. No, the controversy of blogs (are they all dirty liars or can you actually read factual information on a screen?) that 'swept' the national media was different from the people who were actually observing them grow.

I think #4 is oversimplifying things. Talks of emergent technology similar to the proposed-Google formula of relative ads and stuff has been going on for a long time. Often, something insignificant and stupid like Star Trek can spawn things like--hey, flip top phones (I'm kidding, I just meant in the grand spectrum of things).

I think that analogies fine for parrot blogs. But for real, independent, digital media centers/organizations, the analogy would be the artist tired of the bullshit and starting his own studio.

[Gorefiend]

The NYT never ceased to exist in the Flash. It just took its articles offline, in protest of the Supreme Court's desicion that taking bits of many other people's work and putting them together again was legal.

That, personally, is where I draw the line. As in, that's the bit that I really don't think would be happening. Many reasons why. If I was to write a report for school with every three sentences from different sources, verbatim or very slightly changed to be coherent, then I'd probably get a zero and a note on my file saying I'm a plagiarist. If I did that on the college level, I'd easily be expelled. Why would Google get any different treatment?

Although, I must say, getting a program to do what I described above is also near impossible. And I'm being optimistic here.