I always had this fantasy that with the development of social networks some traditional -and in my view very evil industries (e.g. Traditional media and jounalism) would go extinct. Recently I found out that day is not very far.
But first, Let me explain why I think professions like journalism are in nature immoral . The rationale for such -some may say harsh- thinking is that the public media puts too much power at the hands of few “editors” to control the attention of the society. To filter the news and with it our attention.
One might say that we all control one anothers flow of attention but it’s very different from when someone is doing it for a living. to steal from Sinclare I can say It’s hard to expect a journalist not to abuse his power by engineering readers attention when his salary depends upon abusing it. To be honest, Journalism is nothing more than delicate attention engineering. Editor ship is nothing but arranging news items in a newspaper page. I’ve worked in a news paper. It works that way.
But what do I mean by engineering attention and why is it so important to me. It is so important because one can not think about anything unless s/he pay attention to it . Or – and more importantly- if one doesn’t pay attention to something s/he will not think about it. This statement has a darker side to it and that is, if you can manage the attention of public you can make them think about what you want them to think about. I know, all Journalists are not evil but this quality is in the nature of journalism. Even I publishing this humble blog in this corner of digital world am doing it. If I am successful and you are reading this sentence then I have riveted your attention and I am taking your line of thought with me. It’s not important if you agree with me or not the matter is that you are thinking about this post. Let me make an example. Try not thinking about big pink elephant! Why I think journalism will die?
Now why do I think the death of journalism is so close? A while ago a report was published by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ). The first four paragraphs of the report speaks for itself:
http://www.journalism.org/node/7493
“If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people?If a new crop of user-news sites—and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites—are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources, according to a new study.
The report, released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ), compared the news agenda of the mainstream media for one week with the news agenda found on a host of user-news sites for the same period.
In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three leading user-news sites—Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us—were more focused on stories like the release of Apple’s new iphone and that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth, according to the study.” [more]
The study concludes that Digg (founded 2003), del.icio.us (founded 2004) and Reddit (founded 2005) focus on more trivial items of news when compared to 48 mainstream news outlets. Let me tell you what, The first news paper was published in 1594! (ref) I should say what a triumph for PEJ!
[on the side: As I was typing this I came a cross this post on Particles (R) blog. this is the poll on CNN's front page a few days ago.
I guess PEJ had a lucky week for their experiment.
[Clarification: I am not saying journalism is evil and should be for example banned. It's a beast we need to examine government records and issues of our world. It's necessary for traditional democracy. It has certain privileges. Reporters can examine secret government records. To be honest the social news websites are more focused on trivial items of news but think of a time when the 20-somethings who tag or digg in these websites become 40-something professionals. That is my Idea of Earth 2.0. Things will change. that is for sure.]
