[iDC] the politics of journalism

[Bernard Roddy]

For what it's worth, this post from Joshua Levy is encouraging.  I follow efforts by death row inmates on Texas Death row, and the MySpace and penpal journalism phenomenon holds a powerful potential for some serious reflection on an issue that corporate media has a strangle-hold over.  Of course we'll take the "professional" journalist, but only when they know what they're talking about.  (To say there's no call to replace traditional media is, perhaps, minimizing a problem, of course.)  By contrast, I was disappointed by the discussion raised by Michel Bauwens and Robert Labossiere.  Bauwens says something about "the key" to successful projects, making reference to "community validation" and "quality," and answering Labossiere's call for ideas on "talent" and "agents."  This just sounds like business school to me.
   
  Bernie

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO (Joshua Levy)
2. Agency (was Re: THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO) (Samuel Rose)


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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2007 10:22:40 -0400
From: "Joshua Levy" 
Subject: Re: [iDC] THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO
To: "sergio basbaum" 
Cc: Craig Bellamy , idc at mailman.thing.net
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

I've been reading through a galley copy of Keen's book and I've been struck
by its similarity to Nicholas Lemann's piece in the New Yorker last summer,
in which Lemann worried about the effect of citizen journalism on
professional journalism. Sure, citizen journalism might provide hyper-local
commentary and help round out coverage, he wrote, but it can never replace
the kind of well-funded investigative journalism that sustains our
democracy, etc.

The problem is, I've never heard any citizen journalist or advocate for
citizen journalism suggest that traditional media should be replaced; Lemann
set up a straw man that he could conveniently use to scare the pros out
there about the blog menace that, with their amateur-hour ramblings and
content-aggregating CMSs, were going to destroy traditional media and
therefore the very foundations of our democracy... it all sounded like the
protestations of someone nervous that his grip on the status quo was
loosening, and he was feeling defensive. What he failed to mention was
that big media companies were too arrogant to notice that the public was
coming to expect a more transparent approach to reporting, and was coming to
think of itself as a producer rather than a receiver of content, and now
that it was almost too late they were blaming it all on those damn
amateurs.

While I do think that the "web 2.0" is about opening up the process of
making, receiving, sending, remixing, gatekeeping, mashing, etc. to more
people (democratizing the process), like citizen journalism, this isn't
about replacing an old paradigm of trusted sources with a new one of amateur
relativity, it's about (hopefully) correcting a model that represents the
interests of a very elite, wealthy few -- though those elite tend to own the
most popular participatory sites, as Trebor has pointed out, which certainly
complicates things.

In any case, the big media companies won't become extinct because of this;
instead they will have to learn how to coexist in a new environment that
invites a broader conception of culture and art than their market-tested
approach allows.

And while this means that alongside some culturally important stuff we see a
lot of inanity on YouTube, or narcissistic chatter on MySpace, it's not like
inanity and narcissism are hard to find on any television channel...

-Josh




       
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