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The Plane in Hudson River

author: www-data

US Airways Flight 1549 went down into the Hudson River today. There's even a Wikipedia article featuring this.

And the amazing part is that the article was written mere minutes after the incident, even before first traditional news media started reporting. But you can read that elsewhere, here [heise.de, german] for example.

The tricky part is that the event triggered some amounts of discussion about the Web2.0 vs. traditional journalism, mostly regarding "accuracy of reporting". Well, if you ask me, people couldn't get this more wrongly even if they tried to! Everybody gets all heated up about bloody unimportant details like "accuracy" of reporting, and most of us, although in the middle of the battle, miss that part of this rattle which is actually important.

The whole discussion not supposed to be about friggin' quality -- something waaaay more important is at stake here!

It's about the power. Power over us all.

How come? Here's how:

Knowledge is power. Information is... well, that depends. Information can be knowledge, if properly filtered. But it can also be the exact opposite, if "properly" filtered (just think of censorship, propaganda, etc). Thus, the real power lies within the one that can dedice how to apply the filtering on the available information.

Up until now, the filtering is applied by a (fairly small) group of people, i.e. the "reporters", who are paid to "report" to us. While not all of them are ill-intended (in fact, I believe most of them are quite ok), they do suffer from the impediment that they are... well paid to report. That is, they do have an employer, or, in plain old english, a boss. And -- because that's the whole point of having a boss -- that person tells them what to do, which every now and then boils down to eventually telling them what to write and what to not.

Now bosses are not evil. Not by default, at least. But they do have a lot of constraints. Some these do, others do not overlap with your need for information, e.g. keeping the company alive and out of trouble. So, ultimately, the decision about how information is filtered depends on quite a lot of constraints, which -- carefully formulated -- do not necessarily always have match your interests best ;)

And this is what the fuss about Web2.0 vs. traditional journalism is actually about: it's about who gets to answer the quetion "Who's to choose what we are told about and what not?"

In Web2.0 journalism, the power is equally distributed over every single one of us. In traditional journalism, there is a chief officer at every newspaper, who has the ultimate decision over whether an article is to be printed or dropped.

This is what the point is here, not bloody "quality"! What would you choose? 100 bloggers (perhaps stupid), each and every one of them describing to you an event from their (at times somewhat reduced :-) point of view, or one (maybe brighter) reporter, who tells you as much about an event, as he thinks that you should know?

And don't forget: even in the unlikely event that 100 random folks happen to collectively get it wrong all the way, you might still have a chance of filtering our real information from whatever junk they produce, provided that you can make decent use of your brain! But if that one reporter skips information, irrelevenat whether by accident or by purpose, there's little to no way for you of knowing that something's wrong...

fb.

2009-01-16 17:52 | www-datarootshell.ro | [/digest/freespeech] | permanent link