Dan’s once again assaying the “hierarchical top down media of old” (paraphrased) from his glossy light and fiber driven seat on the web.
Things seem to be leavening out in the media industry on the whole. Paper made it extremely easy to get into publishing the first time around, and cheap paperback novels were disruptive in their day.
Of course, I’m not so sure paper really replaced anything else. Straight up speech, maybe. But we still speak even in the presence of such a pervasive pulped medium.
So yea, it thins out the crowd so to speak. New forms of communication start killing off the less useful representations of old. There aren’t many signal towers left, for instance.
Now we’ve got people droaning on about matching their bag and hair color or sheer entertainment. Of course you’ve got other media out there aside from blogs. Most of that feeds on the same newspaper backend though. Hell, most of the blogs feed on that very same backend and regurgitate it, rather than offering a pervasive local reporting medium (though I’ve gotta say most of the BWP Network is shaping up to be focused).
So maybe it’s all about the local reporting, but the local reporting just hasn’t materialized in the interactive medium yet? It’s quite possible that more people will take a shine to this type of editorializing when there’s some meat to it and it’s less the editorial, more the report.
But is this switchover going to start pushing the means of creation to the masses? The same masses that couldn’t be bothered to create their own paper based medium? I’m not so sure.
I think it might just be a culling of the worst of the old delivery mechanism and a feeling out of a new medium. It’s probably not going to suddenly change the way people have entrenched their receptiveness to information and tuned in where they trust, though.
