phyzzics of nooz
Solid: A small community of speakers can probably agree, more or less, on what's the news.
Liquid: A larger community, with a broader spectrum of the real and of views thereof, has more difficulty, and probablistically will be happier with algorithms than with any single vendor's version of "the" news. Especially when the vendor's life support consists mostly of vending advertisements for entities that aim to control credit markets, environment, intellectual property, "entertainment," etc.
Gas: Scale up beyond that larger community and the very notion of "news" begins to sputter, undergo another phase change. What scalable technique, method, or epistemology do we have to sensibly represent "the news" to the gathering digital maelstrom of global voices? The news about the war in Iraq is that there is no news, no single report, however complex, that can adequately acquit itself to all speaking communities of all nations of all earths.
Labels: commodification of news media, discursive intelligence, journaljizm
posted by Tom Matrullo at Friday, March 28, 2008
3 Comments:
The compound eye and the distributed consciousness of the hive mind.
I'm resisting less and accepting more the seemingly inevitable phase change. One stumbling block has been the near-infantile nature of its nucleus.
But then yesterday - of course, because it's made of the up and coming, who are perforce the very young, with all that brings: innocent, naive, inexperienced, but hopeful by necessity. If we can just purge the namby-pamby and the puritanical from it, strip those rigid filters away. Shove the counselors of regress and federally sanctioned Grundies out the way.
The news as ballast and chink for the cracks, giving way to the widening stream, seeing more and more of what's really there. Like those images made up of pixilated hundreds of images.
One thing that's kept the panopticon from evolving coherently and appropriately is that naivety in the actual employed monitoring humans, they see things through the cameras they have no preparation for, or have been doctrinized against and it traumatizes them, makes them react defensively and antagonistically. Tele-tubby hive mindedness. But that's shifting now.
Like it or not the choice is narrowing to cooperating with the Great Collective Brain, or devolving into ferally independent primates, who likely end up cooking rodent carrion in hubcap frying pans.
There's a potential jump of magnitude becoming available I think - a few more clicks and we're all, or lots of us, connected in ways that melt the barriers. A common vision of cybernautical early-days, delayed some by the grinding awfulness of desperate old-order tyranny.
Call those solid local small communities of news-affinites the rods and cones of the perceptual array. And the liquid, steam.
look at Pran. as a dedicated local phenom. from the killing fields to the meadowlands. in between, some people managed to re-stage his story as universal.
It may be one thing we are learning along the way to Gas is a new respect for what might be considered universal. What "some people" wish to stage or restage, spin or brand as universal might look rather local a bit farther along.
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