Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott

Author:Don Tapscott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: PENGUIN GROUP (CANADA)
Published: 2012-07-05T12:12:11+00:00

THE DARK SIDE

It’s pretty clear that newspapers, at least in their present form, will not survive. Those that do will have to adopt a much different model. But what are the implications for society when these pillars of pluralism and free speech are gone? Will new mechanisms emerge to replace the traditional filters for accuracy, balance, and journalistic standards that newspapers currently provide? Who will create the quality journalism we have come to expect, particularly the investigative journalism critical to the health of our democratic system? And will society become increasingly balkanized without the social glue that newspapers provide today? For those of us who care about the role an independent media plays in a free society, these are among the most vexing questions we face.

What Happens to Quality Journalism?

For some, “citizen journalism” is an oxymoron, right up there with military music and jumbo shrimp. They pine for the old days when the major papers determined what news was “fit to print” and millions of readers trusted their judgment. Now via the Internet you get “all the news” whether it’s fit to print or not. And for skeptics like Andrew Keen this democratization creates a problem, namely a vast heap of mediocrity that crowds out the good stuff and confuses consumers. In his book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, Keen argues that user-generated content is destroying journalism and, for that matter, society. To Keen, “The more layers you have between the originator of content and the recipient of content, the better. Because that means more editing, correction, and improvement.”

On the other side of the spectrum are the optimists, the ones who subscribe to the “don’t worry, it’ll all come out in the wash” school. Cody Brown argues that distributed networks of everyday people will do a better job at maintaining quality than the traditional media. “News is important. It’s so important that leaving it to a group of people in an office downtown is and has always been irresponsible,” he says. To Brown, when a public can talk to itself it “can be counted on to share and disseminate its own news.” What’s missing is a better mechanism to do this, so he’s launched kommons.com, a news company at the intersection of journalism, massive real-time collaboration, and mobile technology. The insight, according to Brown, is simple: “Instead of telling a public what is news, we create a space for them to tell each other.”33

Recent data actually provides some evidence to support the optimists’ view. Among all those amateur journalists are growing ranks of serious and competent people. In fact the dichotomy between amateurs and professionals is blurring. Many bloggers (28 percent) are now professionals in that they make a living from blogging. They are professional in another sense too: 40 percent of these commercial bloggers have worked within traditional media.34 They have formal journalism experience, training, and credentials. This fact undermines the critique of Andrew Keen. Rather than professionals being displaced by rank

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