Okay, so this was mostly super's idea. But, in an IM conversation, I started talking about my field of interest in future studies - the effects of internet phenomenons such as memetic mutation and the decentralization of newsmaking in high-scale communication - and it turned into a general conversation about the field of communication, particularly the journalistic industry, its direction, its problems and its possibilities. I've a lot of interest on the subject, but not too much information other than simple theory-making from casual observation. For an idea, I think this excerpt for the conversation can be a decent starter.
[00:28] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> Well.
[00:28] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> The journalist medium is an industry, right?
[00:29] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> It's also an industry with very close ties to political power.
[00:29] <superaielman> Oh.
[00:29] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> When the main instrument of power of an industry leaks into the public widespread, how can it maintain its power and relevance?
[00:30] <superaielman> The days of the gentlemen's agreement are long over. Where it goes from here is interesting. All this news doesn't mean it's good or even informative news.
[00:30] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> Exactly.
[00:31] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> The immediate effect is that the industry-given news now have to fight for space with news that aren't any more or less informative or good in practice, since the journalistic credo of objectivity simply doesn't pan out in reality.
[00:31] <superaielman> MAYBE IT'LL BE LIKE JOHNNY MEMONIC!!!
[00:32] * Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee burns Keanu Reeves.
[00:32] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> Ahem.
[00:33] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> But the bottom line is that, with its main instruments leaked into the public, and little to no backup to maintain a stranglehold, the very purpose of journalism becomes hard to justify, especially considering how much it deviated from its intent back in the French Revolution.
[00:33] <superaielman> I think there's going to be a market for good, objective news in the end of the day. WHy has CNN's ratings gone up in recent years?
[00:34] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> Oh, I certainly can agree.
[00:34] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> However, the role of journalism also has to be rethought.
[00:34] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> It can't be just provide news anymore.
[00:34] <Hello-WheelchairWaddleDee> And it'll also need to reconsider how strongly it borrows from other study fields.
[00:35] <superaielman> More than ever it has to provide news from a trustworthy source. Crediblity can be blown in a day and takes decades to build up.
This excerpt sorta sums up my questionings in a surface level. I think that the consideration on rethinking the role of the news industry is pretty big a deal - something it needed to do decades ago, and still struggles to even begin without hitting stumps - for starters, many don't even consider journalism a scientific study field, and it academically suffers from its heavily hybrid nature - it borrows elements from literature, history, philosophy, sociology and politics, but doesn't seem to create its own body easily.
Then, there are the matter-of-fact issues on the actual newsgiving: credibility? Freedom of choice over news? The responsibility on the portrayal (or reshaping, at a logical extreme) of reality to a public that now has the possibility to use the same tools as the industry to create the same effect, only without the same sense of scale? There's a lot of stuff to think about, and it often gets blurred. And the new media puts the very purpose of journalism in check - why have a field to the passing of news when this is now highly accessible to an uneducated citizen?
So, yeah, I'm mostly throwing this out for gathering ideas, thoughts and theories on the overall post-modern media subject. Hope it's not too vague, and that this gets some interest.
