John Gushue plucks a quote from Tod Maffin's blog this morning:
Listen. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are not a well-respected, branded "public radio station." In today's media environment, you are simply an option to add to the assembly line. Or not. They will pick, swap, mix, rip, burn, podcast, mod, and mashup their media (or, soon enough, their software or devices will do that for them) to present them with a personalized view of the world.The trouble with well-intentioned futurism like this is it is technological elitism. 90% of the people in the world in the next hundred years will likely remain grateful to have a transistor radio or just the next low level tool if they have heard of such a thing - they have crops to grow and paramilitaries to avoid. Given the last 30 years trend of software and devices not moving to a price point where most can buy most things - companies have to make money even if their costs are low you know - it is unlikely that there will be any quick shift in that pattern to alter the interest in the cheap immediacy of radio. Plus, of the 10% remaining over 90% of people who have access to these tools are not the slightest bit interested in swapping, mixing, ripping, burning, podcasting, modding, and mashupin' their media. That will still be the realm of the nerd in 2020 or 2050 with new tech as it was in 1920 with radio and TV sets which, for most people, do pretty much the same thing now as they did then - though I am expecting holographic TV any time now.
Most people I work with how are younger than me have no interest in the internet and other new information communications technologies other than for email. They do have an interest in entertainment technologies as they are more interested in being entertained than informed as most folk are who do not have to worry about the crops and the paramilitaries.
Comments
Marian - October 11, 2005 2:40 PM
As Trudeau once said, and I paraphrase: "Pythagoras may be yesterday's man, but two plus two still equals four." In a way, people and societies don't really change that much. I think Maffin is being cavalier to suggest that they do. For instance, one thing that seems to be a recurring theme is that democracies need certain organisations to perform certain necessary functions. We need to know what government is doing in order to make intelligent decisions when we vote. We need to know what our representatives are up to and also what the consequences of certain domestic policies are. Likewise we may also need to know what our country is doing internationally and we need to know enough about the global context to see the significance of our country's activity. So, it's not that there is nothing new, it's that it's not really new enough that we need to reinvent journalism on the model of a do-it-yourself-all-you-can-eat-buffet. To suggest that we do need to start from scratch seems very rash. It reminds me of that scene in the "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" where Arthur Dent's house is being demolished to make room for a new highway. Arthur doesn't want this so he decides to park himself in front of the bulldozers. His friend Ford Prefect convinces Arthur to leave by telling the work crew that since Arthur intends to stay all day they should just pretend he's there so that Arthur can go down to the pub for a drink. The work crew happily agrees to this arrangement and Dent goes off to the bar. Of course as soon as Arthur leaves they bulldoze his house. Ford, obviously, has his own reasons (good ones) for leading Arthur astray, but if you just take the incident on its own, it seems to embody something of pattern of thinking that goes: it's-the-new-such-and-such and therefore the normal rules of logic no longer apply.
Alan - October 11, 2005 2:51 PM
Very Boing-boingy.
Alan - October 11, 2005 2:52 PM
...but, of course, I just don't "get it", you know.
Marian - October 11, 2005 4:06 PM
I know. You're just an old fuddy duddy.
I guess I think that what left wing blogs are doing in the US is much less destructive than what Maffin is suggesting we do to the CBC. Let's imagine the press is a liver. Forgive my terrible analogies, I'm still on a functions kick. Anyway, where Maffin is saying, we need to get rid of the liver because it's-the-new-body-now, (and it doesn't need to detoxify, we can remain toxic, let's replace the liver with an elbow or a kleenex blah blah blah), a lot of left wing blogs such as Boing Boing and Wonkette etc. and some right wing blogs in the US are acting as an artificial liver because the US press, for a bunch of reasons, is not producing information that is in the public interest or it's producing the information, but it's putting it on page 18 or the equivalent on TV, (so blogging there is a stop-gap which may not last, but it's performing a function, albeit imperfectly). Some of that function is in showing that opinion journalism isn't that hard to produce. Of course, many of us knew that already. That's why news organisations when they try to cut costs replace journalists with perky (!) people and get rid of the content. And unfortunately there's been a lot of that kind of cost cutting in journalism. So much so that bloggers can see themselves as comparable to the mainstream. This has caused some soul-searching among actual journalists. Let's be clear, we're not talking about Seymour M. Hersh anymore or Patrick Brown. No contemporary blogger should compare themselves to those guys, obviously. But some of the functions that blogging has picked up have to do with style i.e., in being less afraid (than the mainstream) of being direct, that is, not pulling a punch. Blogging is also reordering news, so that page A2 is now irrelevant and page A 18 is now the front page. Anyway, the more the industry cuts back on actual journalism, the less it performs the task it needs to perform, and the more it becomes comparable to a whole bunch of other things. I don't think that this should be celebrated. But I do think it needs to be pointed out. It's why we need to move in the other direction with the CBC. Hire some real reporters full time. Keep the veteran reporters on as long as possible and bring the new reporters in as assistants. Ignore the futurists. They'll burn down the monastery with all the ancient knowledge in it.