Jay Rosen has a terrific post about the state of media.
Jay analyzes the scene:
… the filmmakers are showing us what the mass audience was: a particular way of arranging and connecting people in space. Viewers are connected “up” to the big spectacle, but they are disconnected from one another. Or to use the term I have favored, they are “atomized.” But Howard Beale does what no television person ever does: he uses television to tell its viewers to stop watching television.
He goes on to ask what would happen today in response to a “Howard Beale” event…
Immediately people who happened to be watching would alert their followers on Twitter. Someone would post a clip the same day on YouTube. The social networks would light up before the incident was over. Bloggers would be commenting on it well before professional critics had their chance. The media world today is a shifted space. People are connected horizontally to one another as effectively as they are connected up to Big Media; and they have the powers of production in their hands.
Jay follows with an expansion of his comments, and concludes with a set of recommendations for today’s journalists. (The post is a must-read for journalists and news bloggers.)
There’s been too much hand-wringing over the supposed collapse of journalism as we know it, but journalism’s never been more exciting, never had the kind of tools and channels of information available today. We’re seeing, not collapse, but evolution.
WEBLOGSKY: Jon Lebkowsky's Blog
Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added above. The cited post by Jay Rosen is extremely rich in organization and content and therefore a REFERENCE as well as a Weblosky Extract. Epoch B “bottom=up” everything, open everything, and a restoration of human scale and human values, are all at tipping points.
