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tony curzon price's List: Credibility in the New News

  • The Crowd

  • Feb 23, 08

    Politicians have long grown used to facing the wrath of the rabble. It was the vote that brought them to heel. Now, it seems, the web may subject journalists to similar treatment. We shouldn't be surprised that they don't like it. Priesthoods prefer quiescent congregations.

    For the moment, our media elite just doesn't seem to get it. The Guardian's director of digital content, announcing she has a "duty of care" to protect contributors from abuse, sounds like the Speaker, trying to safeguard MPs from attacks on their dubious perks. Yet even he doesn't attempt to insulate his flock from mere denigration.

    The media's audience has seized hold of the microphone. It will express itself as it will, and we shall all be the better for it.

    • Since the dawn of the mass media, its practitioners have enjoyed a peculiar degree of immunity from the complaints of those they address. Understandably, they've taken advantage of this, growing lazy, sloppy, self-satisfied, self-indulgent, nepotistic and arrogant. Readers have sensed this, but until recently have been powerless to do anything about it. Now, the internet has given them a voice.
    • Hoo-blinking-ray.Someone gets it!

    1 more annotation...

  • Feb 24, 08

    We are entering a world where users can accomplish more with a click of a mouse than lawyers and bankers can do with threats of a lawsuit and angry phone calls to the chief executive

    • We are entering a world where users can accomplish more with a click of a mouse than lawyers and bankers can do with threats of a lawsuit and angry phone calls to the chief executive
  • Feb 24, 08

    Hoping to defeat the complex network of invisible insurgents who have a panoply of tools and anonymity options unmatched by the corporate world, is not only naïve — it carries big publicity costs for those who are convinced otherwise.

    What's worse (for the companies), many contemporary legal regimes — particularly in Scandinavian countries — provide a legal shelter for these cyberactivists-turned-insurgents, and there is no indication that such laws will become stricter. If anything, they might be relaxed.

  • Economics

  • Feb 23, 08

    If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?

    • we are sailing into the future on a sinking ship.
    • Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.

    1 more annotation...

  • Feb 23, 08

    So, with these two types of institutions in mind, can we rest assured that the pieces of the newspaper will be re-assembled with no loss? Or will there be a systematic ``blind spot'' created by the mechanisms of fragmentation and re-aggregation? Conceptually the blind-spot is plainly there: where what is produced depends for any part of its character on the particular aggregate that it will form, the breaking of the link between the pieces of lego and the final assemblage will change what lego is built.

  • Profession and Ethics

  • Networked Journalism

  • Feb 23, 08

    I think a better term for what I’ve been calling “citizen journalism” might be “networked journalism.”

  • Feb 23, 08

    Networked journalism is where the people formerly known as the audience contribute to the whole editorial process. The public write blogs, take pictures, gather information and comment as part of newsgathering and publishing. The professional journalists become filters, connectors, facilitators and editors.

  • Feb 24, 08

    One final question Emily, and I hope you will reply:

    Have you seen Paul Gogarty's website, where he boasts about his ability to place travel-related articles in the mainstream media?

    http://www.paulgogartycommunications.co.uk/media_contact.aspx

    And if you're now seeing it for the first time, does it explain to you better our indignance?

    Again, congratulations for being the first one to come down to talk to us, so to speak.

    • One final question Emily, and I hope you will reply:

        

      Have you seen Paul Gogarty's website, where he boasts about his ability to place travel-related articles in the mainstream media?

        

      http://www.paulgogartycommunications.co.uk/media_contact.aspx

        

      And if you're now seeing it for the first time, does it explain to you better our indignance?

        

      Again, congratulations for being the first one to come down to talk to us, so to speak.

  • Critics

  • Feb 26, 08


    There is a quest for truth in blogging. But it is a truth with a question mark. Truth has become an amateur project, not an absolute value, sanctioned by higher authorities. I

    • Can we talk of a "fear of media freedom"? It is too easy to say that there is freedom of speech and that blogs materialize this right. The aim of radical freedom, one could argue, is to create autonomy and overcome the dominance of media corporations and state control and to no longer be bothered by "their" channels. Most blogs show an opposite tendency. The obsession with news factoids borders to the extreme. Instead of selective appropriation, there is over-identification and straight out addiction, in particular to the speed of real-time reporting. Like Erich Fromm (author of Fear of Freedom), we could read this as "a psychological problem" because existing information is simply reproduced and in a public act of internalization. Lists of books that still have to be read, a common feature on blogs, lead in the same direction. According to Fromm, freedom has put us in an unbearable isolation. We thus feel anxious and powerless. Either we escape into new dependencies or realize a positive freedom that is based upon "the uniqueness and individuality of man".[49] "The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own."[50] The freedom from traditional media monopolies leads to new bondages, in this case to the blog paradigm, where there is little emphasis on positive freedom, on what to with the overwhelming functionality and the void of the empty, white entry window. We do not hear enough about the tension between the individual self and the "community", "swarms", and "mobs" that are supposed to be part of the online environment. What we instead see happening on the software side are daily improvements of ever more sophisticated (quantitive) measuring and manipulation tools (in terms of inbound linking, traffic, climbing higher on the Google ladder, etc.). Isn't the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn't the truthness lie in the unlinkable?
    • The  hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention  to it?
    • destruction of the author
      unaccountability of wikipedia

      - tony curzon price on 2007-04-08
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