[Based on a presentation by Ira Glickstein to the Philosophy Club, The Villages, FL, 08 April 2011. Powerpoint slides are available
HERE]
UNSEAT THE ELITE!
What if everybody had a printing press with worldwide reach at essentially zero cost? Well we do!
The
Blogosphere
is a growing, multi-million person army of citizen journalists. Anyone can create a blog that can be read by anyone else, instantaneously and worldwide, at essentially no cost.
Technological developments in the past decades have diluted the ownership of the press from a monopoly of the professional, connected, monied elite to a more balanced playing field where ordinary people can reach extraordinary audiences. The elite no longer choose what is "the news of the day".
As the left-hand panel of the graphic indicates, the traditional model has professional authors and reporters, who are assigned by and work for media conglomerates, gathering and reporting the news of the day. Their work is funnelled through the editorial and publications processes of the media conglomerates and is then flushed down upon the people, who the media elite regard as "The Great Unwashed Public". We poor souls at the bottom have no choice but to lap it up. (Yes, there are "Letters to the Editor" and call-ins on Talk Radio, but these are screened and selected by the same media elite who published and broadcast the original stories, so effective views that happen to be contrary may not see the light of day.)
We, now
do have a choice. The new model, shown in the right-hand panel, consists of literally hundreds of millions of non-professionals who run blogs out of their homes, and billions of blog readers who may become commenters at the flip of the switch on their PCs and laptops. Bloggers interact with each other on a peer-to-peer basis. Of course there are some blogs with greater readership and influence than others, but it is an almost pure meritocracy. My blog -and yours- is just as convenient to bring up on any computer as the most influential blog in the world!
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
We are fortunate enough to know the exact moment of truth when the media elite decline began. It was late one Saturday night back in January 1998, when, at precisely 11:32:47 PM, Pacific Standard Time, in the kitchen of his apartment in Hollywood, CA, a strange looking fellow named Matt Drudge posted an item to his news aggregation blog. His scoop was the fact that Newsweek Magazine had just spiked a story by veteran reporter Michael Isikoff, apparently for political reasons, because the story was about the then President of the United States and his sexual affair with a young intern named Monica Lewinsky.
Quoting
This Day in Tech History: "Almost overnight it seems, traditional news media, especially newspapers, began to lose ground to Internet news sources."
The
Drudge Report continues to be one of the most popular websites in the world. I visit it a couple times a day to check on the latest news. Unlike other popular websites, the Drudge Report continues its "plain Jane" style (or lack thereof), linking major media reoports of the news stories I most want to read and sometimes breaking new stories of its own.
MY BLOGOSPHERE PORTFOLIO
I've had a blog since the mid-1900's. The first one I had to code in raw HTML because there were no editors available to me at the time. It is still online at
http://pages.prodigy.net/ira/home.htm, frozen in time because I have not had access to it for about seven years.
I currently have four Google Blogs, the one you are reading now,
The Vitual Philosophy Club, plus
Curb Your Enthusiasm - Fantasy Episodes,
2052 - Life, Liberty and Technology - predictions for the second half of the 21st Century, and
2052-The Hawking Plan, my free online novel.
I also have a dozen Google Knols to my credit, and
here is the list. Knols (bits of knowledge) are Google's answer to Wikipedia. Ironically, I started writing Knols after Wikipedia rejected a scholarly item I wrote about Optimal Span. I made the mistake of mentioning that it was based on my PhD Dissertation and one of the Wikipedia volunteer reviewers thought that was inappropriate. It turns out that Wikipedia has a formal review process. My item was challenged, I made changes and appealed the challenge, and some comittee voted and excised my item.
Even though I think their process misfired in my case, overall this experience enhanced my respect for the integrity of Wikipedia items on important topics. Yes, anyone can post misinformation to Wikipedia on unimportant topic areas, but they do have dedicated volunteer reviewers for domains of importance. So, rejected by Wikipedia, I went to Google Knols and posted my Optimal Span item there. (A great example of the efffectiveness of competition in increasing the freedom of choice of writers and audiences!)
Over the past few years, I have posted a dozen Knols on many topics, and they have garnered over 20,000 page views.
Back in December of last year, I became a
Guest Contributor at the world's most viewed climate website,
Watts Up With That?, which this year was voted Best Science Blog. Since December, I have posted 16 topics, garnering over 90,000 page views, and a few thousand comments. It is quite thrilling, and a bit humbling, to post an item and, within 24 hours, have a few thousand page views and a one- or two-hundred comments!
I'm doing my share promoting the citizen's army of journalists. And by reading (and commenting) on this, you are too!
Ira Glickstein
