Clay Shirky has a post up entitled Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable – he looks at the slow-motion destruction of the current media model and the uncertainty around what will replace it.
Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
I don’t think blogging can come close to replacing journalism (although when it comes to commentary and analysis I think the blogosphere has largely overtaken the MSM: Garth George, Trotter, Ralston et al didn’t set the bar terribly high.)
If I had to close my eyes and guess I’d pick that print journalism’s replacement will evolve from the Wiki model – although I can’t quite imagine how that will work. The Boston Review writes about the birth and evolution of Wikipedia and raised questions about the homogenity of the wiki authors:
Wikipedia’s potential lies in harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”; however, those crowds are only as wise as they are diverse. The individuals who compose the crowd need to bring different sets of expertise to the project. But in Wales’s own words, Wikipedians are “80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30.” This homogeneity, too, may explain the persistence of certain knowledge gaps.
Who are those people? What makes them so addicted to “wikicrack,” to spending countless hours improving the site, often doing mundane, repetitive tasks that they would never do for money?
Today I needed to look up an algorithm that found a spanning tree in a connected graph. And it’s in Wikipedia! And as always I wondered who on Earth took the time to write that article.
I’m always a bit bewildered when I read about Jimmy Wales and his devotion to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Isn’t the idea of millions of anonymous users selflessly toiling away on a grand project the total opposite of what Objectivists believe?
Journalist like to think that they are objective as well.
I found the following article on Wales’ objectivism and Wikipedia’s Neutral-Point-Of-View policy interesting:
Enlightened doubt : Wikipedia’s postmodern search for truth
Comment by Adhominem — November 9, 2009 @ 11:41 am
“Isn’t the idea of millions of anonymous users selflessly toiling away on a grand project the total opposite of what Objectivists believe?”
Ah.. but they are “free” to choose what they do..
..and they are anal.
JC
Comment by JC — November 9, 2009 @ 11:43 am
the total opposite of what Objectivists believe?
Objectivists don’t ‘believe’, the truth of objectivism is self evident, there for it is spock like logic not a belief system that objectivism is teh best evar.
/snark
Comment by andy — November 9, 2009 @ 11:46 am
Not PC reply in 3,2,1…..
Comment by andy — November 9, 2009 @ 11:46 am
Danyl: Isn’t the idea of millions of anonymous users selflessly toiling away on a grand project the total opposite of what Objectivists believe?
Or does this mean your strawmen have no counterpart in reality?
And on print media? What print media covers South Auckland politics? Absolutely no one.
Comment by Berend de Boer — November 9, 2009 @ 12:01 pm
That there is a crisis in the ‘current media model’ there is no doubt. I am yet to be convinced that the cause is the internet rather than the Murdoch business model eating itself. Media companies made plenty of money. They did so by a relentless drive to the lowest common demoninator and ehat seemed to become almost a cult of cost-cutting in the newsroom. The net result is much of the content from professional organisations is indistinguisable from bloggers opinions and some bloggers (Idiot/Savant & jarbury spring to mind) actually do a better job of backgrounding and reporting than the so-called professionals.
Murdoch recently had a whinge that he couldn’t compete with the BBC on quality, and his solution was to get rid of the BBC so there was no baseline comparisons left at all for him to be embarassed by. Says it all, really.
As for the future… I wonder if the kindle/e-readers might be the future. But I dropped my copy New Scientist in the bath the other week, it was ruined but then again it cost less than $10.00. I wouldn’t like to think what would happen to a kindle dropped into a steaming hot bubble bath.
Comment by Sanctuary — November 9, 2009 @ 12:30 pm
Amongst all this, The Economist is doing awright: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/news-magazines
Comment by StephenR — November 9, 2009 @ 1:09 pm
Or does this mean your strawmen have no counterpart in reality?
Berend de Boer
I would have thought the more obvious answer was that Objectivism has no solid referents in reality and is devoid of mundane validity. Outside the confines of Rand’s thought processes and her minority groupings with their kangaroo courts of what was ultimately Rand’s opinion, Objectivism has very little going for it because the very principles are the antithesis of what makes up Wikipedia, online communities, villages, towns, cities, society and the human race as a whole.
Comment by Chris C — November 9, 2009 @ 1:20 pm
Newspapers and Encyclopedias really developed at the height of the Enlightenment in the 19th century, with high-speed presses, distribution networks and arrogant men who thought they knew everything. The bourgois public sphere has been well served ever since.
Now digital media (like blogging and Wikipedia) threatens these authoritive voices and I welcome the demassification and pluralism that these new mediums create. Knowledge is constantly being added to, it’s truth re-evaluated, and our ability to participate with it re-enfranchised. I reckon objectivist welcome this freedom, but are fearful of how it disturbs their 19th century hegemonic view of the world.
Comment by Adhominem — November 9, 2009 @ 2:14 pm
I’m guessing there’s no inherent problem with libertarians – possibly even objectivists – giving up their time to something they approve of. But I have observed PC to be dead set against charity when that money could be invested and boosting the economy.
Comment by lyndon — November 9, 2009 @ 3:25 pm
I’m guessing there’s no inherent problem with libertarians – possibly even objectivists – giving up their time to something they approve of.
If you take a look at the Roark and Galt speeches in Rand’s books you’ll see that it’s exactly the kind of thing she disapproved of: anonymity, consensus building, collaboration etc: I think she would have regarded Wikipedia as downright evil.
Comment by danylmc — November 9, 2009 @ 3:39 pm
Compare Wikipedia with it’s contemporary and much more Randian-method-approved Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia.
It is not hard to see why the latter has just recently failed.
Comment by Adhominem — November 9, 2009 @ 3:58 pm
@Danyl: “I’m always a bit bewildered when I read about Jimmy Wales and his devotion to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Isn’t the idea of millions of anonymous users selflessly toiling away on a grand project the total opposite of what Objectivists believe?”
Well as Ayn herself would probably say, “Check your premises.”
@Lyndon: “…I have observed PC to be dead set against charity…”
Not quite accurate, Lyndon. Dead set against enforced giving, true. (Which makes me dead set against the IRD.) And dead set on pointing out that in the question of whether it’s better to give than to receive, that it’s actually far better to produce.
@Andy: “Not PC reply in 3,2,1…..”
Always happy to help out Danyl on a slow day. Curious however, don’t you think, that there’s more comment here on Jimmy Wales’s Objectivism than on the issue of ‘Wither the MSM.’ ;^)
Comment by Peter Cresswell — November 9, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
@Peter 13.
Helping hand is always nice, very caring and sharing of you. I think the ‘Wither the MSM’ is a bit of a given, don’t you. The Saturday Herald was 4 hours late here in central auckland and no one missed it
Discussing objectivism and Ayan Rands rape fantasies is sooo much more 2009, shitty dead tree media was an election year theme.
In fact it made my saturday not having to throw up a little in my mouth over Armstrongs latest fawning love note to Jonny K.
Comment by andy (the other one) — November 9, 2009 @ 4:35 pm
Peter Cresswell
Curious however, don’t you think, that there’s more comment here on Jimmy Wales’s Objectivism than on the issue of ‘Wither the MSM.’ ;^)
Maybe there’s more mileage in Objectivism than the same old blogosphere conversation of “mainstream death” popping up everywhere. It’s been touted for a while that the MSM is dying, dead, on its last legs, but that still doesn’t explain why everyone still gets their news from the big mainstream sites or why more often than not bloggers and the mainstream are one and the same. And if they’re not one and the same then it’s rare that they’re up there because they contain credibility, but rather because they contain vitriol or humour or insider analysis, rather than being the 21st century’s equivalent of the wire back in the days of Snopes.
The MSM didn’t have to bite down on a big credit crunch shaped shit sandwich until lately, and it’s not the death of the model, the validity of the news that they pump out, their angle or their analysis that’s causing the trouble, it’s the sudden axe falling on advertising revenue. Rupert’s decision to charge didn’t come into the equation until advertising models collapsed. The recession has seen a significant drop in ad revenue and print sales across the board. That’s nothing to do with the fact that no-one trusts the MSM or that bloggers can do it better – they can’t, largely because it’s not their profession and they don’t have the structure or resources behind them (with exceptions) – but merely the truth that in hard times all industries have to take stock and restructure.
Good media backed by good principles survives – hence the Economist, IPC, APC, EMAP etc. doing rather well – and it’s not like a bunch of cost accountants haven’t had a good look at website cashflow and made sure that they get at least a nominal rate of return on a web investment. It’s not like Fairfax decided to put all their stuff online and didn’t look at the impact, or calculate page impressions and ad revenues, compare them to print editions and look at the knock-on effect on their business.
The MSM will survive. Blogs will survive. In what environment they continue to is the question. There’ll be a higher degree of cooperation, probably. You’ll see blogs conflated, you’ll see legislation starting to be passed because the press councils and various commissions of countries won’t be able to effectively control a lot of output – although that won’t happen for a while, but there’s certainly a significant amount of disquiet in other countries about the apparent immunity of bloggers operating under anonymity or without gatekeeper checks and balances to stop them breaching contempt laws, simply causing gross offence or disseminating mistruths that would see any newspaper castigated by the Press Council.
And bollocks to the “international” defences, too – my site isn’t in this country, you can’t control the internet, etc. – this has been tested over the past decade and the precedents have become fairly clear on where you’re going to be sued or whose jurisdiction you come under.
/end
Comment by Chris C — November 9, 2009 @ 4:59 pm
Wikipedia acts as a gateway to the original sources, so it’s possible to check on assertions without being expert in the subject. One can of course, create an article that selects references to give a biased result, but generally there will be *someone* with a different opinion to refute it.
Does it matter if all Wikifiddlers are 15-year old American males with OCD? For 95% of content, probably not, if they can summarise the reference material adequately. I doubt the Wiki model works for news, just because it’s hard to get volunteers to find and write up fairly boring stories on a timely basis. (Look at the Wikinews NZ portal to see how sketchy it is…)
Comment by Rich — November 9, 2009 @ 6:49 pm
Two or three times in the last year I’ve seen academic books that quote from the wikipedia. One,earlier this year, was a research level book on the subject – not an undergraduate textbook – and it had sidebars every so often explaining things that were lifted verbatim, with acknowledgement, from the wikipedia. Why write your own text on the dorsal and ventral pathways in the visual cortex when you can just copy the work of others? And since they were giving credit it wasn’t, like, you knnow plagiarism.
Also – flicking through a recent copy of The Economist I found lying around over the weekend I came across a review of two books on Rand. It seems that she required her husband to wear bells on his shoes so that she could hear him coming and going. He had no say in the matter. So much for personal freedom.
Comment by chiz — November 9, 2009 @ 7:52 pm
@chiz: What book?
If the sidebars were accurate, then what’s wrong with that? (Well, maybe some license issues if the book wasn’t also GFDL and available in machine readable and copyable form).
The existence of an easily-accessible, broadly accurate collection of information like Wikipedia is a bit of a challenge to academia. Much of the means of assessing students (at school and undergrad level, certainly) involves having them “research” information that is fairly well known. If doing this is made trivial by Wikipedia, then those assesment tasks don’t work anymore, much as many 1970s high school maths questions got rendered obsolete by the calculator.
Comment by Rich — November 9, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
Two or three times in the last year I’ve seen academic books that quote from the wikipedia. One,earlier this year, was a research level book on the subject – not an undergraduate textbook – and it had sidebars every so often explaining things that were lifted verbatim, with acknowledgement, from the wikipedia. Why write your own text on the dorsal and ventral pathways in the visual cortex when you can just copy the work of others? And since they were giving credit it wasn’t, like, you knnow plagiarism.
chiz
Are you entirely sure it wasn’t Wikipedia plagiarising and not the textbook? Or is that just some damn fine irony?
Comment by Chris C — November 9, 2009 @ 10:09 pm
If every major newspaper closed down in NZ, news production wouldn’t stop. I don’t know what would happen to the NZPA, but there would still be TV and radio news. The net is better for opinion and backgrounding a news-story, and there’s the investigative and agglomeration service of Gordon Cambell and Scoop. I wouldn’t miss the Herald.
Comment by Adhominem — November 10, 2009 @ 6:19 am
I can’t remember the title of the book but it was on dyslexia or the neurology of reading or something like that. It was commercially sold book, not free, written by an academic, summarising the state of the art in this area, and with an intended readership of other academics. Its the sort of book in other words that university academics have been writing and selling for decades and the author was too lazy to write all of their own material even though they were a specialist in the subject.
Comment by chiz — November 10, 2009 @ 1:04 pm
I should also clarify that I’m not talking about lifting a few sentences here and there and that sidebar may not be the accurate term. The material interupted the main text but was in coloured boxes that sometimes ran more than a page in length. The book was lifting entire articles from the wikipedia.
Comment by chiz — November 10, 2009 @ 1:14 pm
>I’m always a bit bewildered when I read about Jimmy Wales and his devotion to Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Isn’t the idea of millions of anonymous users selflessly toiling away on a grand project the total opposite of what Objectivists believe?
Why is contributing towards a group project selfless? Don’t contributors gain pride, enjoyment, or knowledge by doing so? That overly narrow, materialistic view of the meaning of “selfish” and the related overly *broad* meaning of “selfless” are not what Rand advocated. In fact, that’s really the entire point of The Virtue Of Selfishness: to show that the conventional views of selfishness and selflessness (which your statement uses) are incorrect, and to point to the alternative.
Comment by Jeff Montgomery — November 10, 2009 @ 2:11 pm
@ Jeff
Or, to put it more succinctly;
Capitalism works best because people natuarlly act in their own self-interest.
Comment by Phil — November 10, 2009 @ 2:40 pm
Why is contributing towards a group project selfless? Don’t contributors gain pride, enjoyment, or knowledge by doing so?
Hey, I agree with you. Your argument is with Ayn, not me:
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received–hatred. The great creators–the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors–stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The first airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.
I think that the Objectivist idea that progress is made by the genius of singular men of vision struggling against the crowd is stupid, others don’t. But you do have to admit that it’s the antithesis of a collaborative, anonymous, consensus based encyclopedia.
Comment by danylmc — November 10, 2009 @ 2:57 pm