A prevalent and dangerous assumption
Reed Johnson had a nice piece in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times that I just got around to reading this morning. It’s a nice overview of what’s taking place in the media world today, and I recommend reading it. Here’s a snippet:
Still, while network CEOs and newspaper publishers wring their hands and mutter darkly about the “balkanization” of civic consciousness, the electorate is finding new ways to stay informed. “If you type ‘Sam Alito’ into [blog search engine] Technorati, you get thousands of results,” says Pang (Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, research director of the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank). “There clearly are a lot of people across the political spectrum who are blogging about this person and whether he should be on the Supreme Court…The collective mind of the blogosphere turns out to be a reasonably good news editor.”
These kinds of articles are especially important for mainstreamers, because a lot of people simply don’t believe the facts. In comments to a post on Lost Remote yesterday, one writer said:
I just don’t think most people want to do all the work required to find out about stories that matter to them. That is why they turn on the news… cause they trust them to do it and do it well.
Trust the media? Gallup’s research shows that trust in the press is at an all-time low.
Like all top-down media, we mistakenly think that people are lazy (and stupid) and need us to do all their work for them. Articles like the one above show that’s an illusion — and one we would do well to remove from our consciousness.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 11:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
December 21st, 2005 at 7:30 am
Terry- While the LATimes article seems a touch deterministic, you hit it on the head with your response to the ‘lazy’ and ’stupid’ masses comment. There are two important things to note: (1) Once a non-geek discovers how easy it is to operate an RSS feed reader, they never surf the same way again, and (2) editors in traditional media need to re-evaluate what it means to be a journalist and their opinions of their viewers/readers. Rupert Murdoch cut to the quick on April 14 — "…reporters and editors think their readers are stupid. In any business, such an attitude toward one’s customers would not be healthy. But in the newspaper business, where we rely on people to come back to us each day, it will be disastrous if not addressed," said Murdoch.
Full Speech: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/04/14/1113251729950.html?oneclick=true
December 21st, 2005 at 8:51 am
Thanks, Ian. I’ve actually been searching for that quote. You rock!