2004 was the year of the blog, and the biggest blog story of the year was the "uncovering" of the shoddy reporting by Dan Rather and 60 Minutes in their segment on the President's National Guard service. Today the Washington Post is reporting that four executives, including Rather's producer Mary Mapes and 60 Minutes Wednesday executive producer Josh Howard, will be fired. According to the independent panel, the story was pursued with a "myopic zeal" which led to a story that failed to meet the network's standard of fairness. In response to the panel's findings, CBS President Leslie Moonves was quoted by the Post as saying that, "there were lapses every step of the way--in the reporting and the vetting of the segment and in the reaction of CBS News in the aftermath of the report." The "aftermath of the report" refers to the bloggers' dismantling of the facts reported by Rather. And if it wasn't for his announced retirement, Rather himself might be in a very difficult position.
This admission of failure by CBS should result in additional support for the notion of The Wisdom of Crowds (see the book by James Surowiecki), however there are still many questions to be answered. For instance, what is the role of bloggers and what should be their relationship to traditional newsgathering organizations? We still need reporters, fact-checkers, editors and publishers...but can the blogsphere be all that and more?
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Perhaps the blogosphere is the closest thing we've seen yet to a true marketplace of ideas. I hope that is the case. My concern about the blogosphere is that the majority of the American populace still is not connected to it. Hopefully, with all the hoopla surrounding the blogosphere's role in the 60 Minutes debacle, more people will check it out and begin participating and voicing their own views. However, I'm not yet convinced that this is going to happen -- there are still plenty of techno-illiterates out there. My question is: How will we know when blogs have truly reached a critical mass and are truly voicing the full range of the marketplace of ideas?
Blog rhymes with clog...And that's a difficulty and challenge for the blogosphere. We are bursting at the seams with information, commentary, opinions, reviews, pictures, jokes, and a wide range of graphic elements that jam the internet with everything from great ideas to junk. We've clogged up our online drains with so much "stuff" that for many it is easier to hit delete than to sort through it all. Or, it is ignored entirely and those gems that are caught in the drain are lost with the wastewater. So if we think of it as the marketplace of ideas, we're probably right: There's some good stuff, but lots of trash that needs to be flushed out with regularity. I regret the plumbing metaphors, but remember the acronym, GIGO....
The information glut is not a new problem...certainly not unique to blogs. Check out this 1990 quote from Neil Postman.
Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the 20th has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems ... Our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know how to use it. – Neil Postman, 1990
In the past, when the sharing of information was more cumbersome, slower, or restricted to those with money and power, the mass media had much more power. But now information (quality issues not withstanding) is much more fluid and dynamic. Some might argue that the solution to too much information is meta-information...information about information. That is, I think, the real power of information distributed via the internet...the indexing and searching of meta-data that makes the torrent accessible again.
ironic that we're having this conversation on a blog.
Just be thankful that the white noise is so intense that there will be jobs for our graduating students into the forseeable future - even if it is as the first generation of internet gatekeepers.
If information overload makes you nervous, this provocative 8-minute clip from the Museum of Media History might just push you over the edge!
http://oak.psych.gatech.edu/~epic/
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