In today’s information and communication revolutionary era, Blogging is fast becoming a cultural and economic force to be reckoned with. Now, in a new era of networked society and digital everything, the economics of news and information distribution are changing radically as the internet absorbs each and every industry it touches at a fraction of the traditional cost. The falling distribution costs are like a dropping waterline and a receding tide. As they fall, they reveal a new land that has been there all along, just underwater. These niches are a great uncharted expanse of products that were previously uneconomic to offer. This is the world of bloggers where suddenly, those amateur writers are able to find an ever ready audience.
The Blogging world is entirely a new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one just beginning to show its power. They’re increasingly forming their own tribes; groups bound together more by affinity and shared interests than by default broadcast and media scheduled spins. The vastly increase choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. The difference between yesterday’s limited choice and today’s abundance is as if our culture was an ocean and the only feature above the surface was islands of news and instant updates.
Our new culture has now shifted from following the controlled-medias to finding our own style and exploring far out beyond the news broadcasting and mainstream media reports, into both relative obscurity and back through time. In a 2005 speech, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch showed that he was the first of the media moguls to grasp the magnitude of today’s elite versus amateur divide: “Young people don’t want to rely on a Godlike figure from above to tell them what’s important,” he said. “They want control over the media, instead of being controlled by it.”
The postwar broadcast era of radio, television and news media are now starting to tatter at the edges. Sales that go with them are not what they once were. Every year network TV and radio stations lose more of its audience. Where had those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into countless niches. The one big growth area is the Web, but it is an uncategorizable sea of million destinations, each defying in its own way the conventional logic of media and marketing. What the internet has done is to allow the people to weave together in a way that amplifies their power and extends their reach. The Web simply unified the elements of a supply-chain revolution that has been brewing for decades. The PC made everyone a producer or publisher, and the internet made everyone its distributors.
The main effect of all this connectivity is unlimited and unfiltered access to culture and content of all sorts, from the mainstream to the farthest fringe of the underground. Today’s children have grown up in a world far less dominated by any of the traditional media and entertainment industries. The cultural landscape is a seamless continuum from high to low, with commercial and amateur content competing equally for their attention. These children don’t distinguish between mainstream Medias and underground niches – they pick what they like from an infinite menu.
The great thing about media and broadcast is that they can bring one piece of news or movie to million of people with unmatchable efficiency. But they can’t bring a million news or shows to one person each. But this is exactly what internet could do and they could do it so well. The shattering of the mainstream media into a zillion different cultural shards is something that upsets traditional media and entertainment.
That first lie to the aphorism that “the power of the press goes to those who own them,” is now put to rest. Now, it’s Blogging that has sparked the renaissance of the amateur publishers. Today, millions of people publish daily for an audience that is collectively larger than any single mainstream media outlet can claim. What sparked Blogging are the democratized tools, the arrival of simple free software and services that made publishing online so easy that anyone could do it.
The consequence of all this is that we’re starting to shift from being passive consumers to active producers. And we’re doing it for the love of it (the word “amateur,” derives from the Latin amator, “lover” from amare, “to love”). We can see it all around us – the extent to which blogs are sharing attention with mainstream media. It’s as if the default setting of production has shifted from “Earned the right to do it” to “what’s stopping you?”
Author Doc Searls call this a shift from consumerism to participative “producerism”:
“The ‘consumer economy’ is a producer-controlled system in which consumers are nothing more than energy sources that metabolize ‘content’ into cash. This is the absolutely corrupted result of the absolute power held by the producers over consumers since producers won the Industrial Revolution.”
Blogging has radically transformed both the marketplace and the economy that thrives on it. The beauty of Blogging is that there is practically no subject so narrow that it can’t have an entry. This is a stark contrast to the mainstream media. With Blogging, we fix and create the contents ourselves. This shift of passive resentment to active participation makes the big difference. To rephrase the old joke about the weather, everybody complains about the spin-doctoring of mainstream media, but now we can do something about it.
However, Blogging entries are ‘non-authoritative’ and in a way, invariably inaccurate. This is inevitable when anyone can write anything, even from nothing. Unlike the mainstream media, each entry is not scrubbed, checked, and labored by responsible professionals (ironically, the mainstream media has now acquired similar characteristics). Each entry is simply conjured from the vacuum.
The debate now is whether the bloggers’ news can be trusted or believed. The answer is not a simple yes or no, because it is the nature of user-created content to be as messy and uncertain at the microscale. It just has to be understood for what it is.
The collective wisdom of millions of bloggers operates on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics – a matter of likelihood rather than certainty. This is a system where nobody is in charge; the intelligence is simply “emergent,” where it arises spontaneously from the number crunching. This is the foundation of our new modern economy, from politics to stock market to Google and there is evidence that our mental software and collective knowledge has evolved faster than ever. The advantage of this system is that the people benefited from the wisdom of the crowd and the bloggers are able to scale both in breadth and depth.
No single blog can be authoritative and it will be a mistake to generalize the quality or nature of its content. But collectively, blogs are proving to be more than an equal to mainstream media. We just need to read more than one of them before making up our own mind as to the accuracy or certainty of the subject matter.
The Weblogs are and will be the ultimate place of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers. Some of them will be great, some will be mediocre, and some will be absolutely crappy. That’s just the nature of the beast.
However, what makes these blogs really extraordinary is that they will improve over time, organically healing itself as if its huge and growing army of tenders were an immune system, ever vigilant and quick to respond to anything that threatens the organism.
Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor writes:
“The exposure culture (of bloggers) reflects the philosophy of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything. Web authors link to each other, quote liberally, and sometimes annotate entire articles. E-mailing links to favorite articles and jokes has become as much a part of our work culture as the water cooler. The big sin in exposure culture is not copying, but instead, failure to properly attribute authorship. And at the center of this exposure culture is the almighty search engines. If your site is easy to find on Google, you don’t sue – you celebrate.”
Blogs have now become the world of “peer production,” the extraordinary internet enabled phenomenon of mass volunteerism and amateurism. We are at the dawn of an age where the main difference between Weblogs and their professional counterparts are simply the shrinking gap in the resources available to them to extend the ambition of their work. When the ultimate tools of production are available to everyone, everyone will become the producer.
(Adapted from the book "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson; Hyperion; 2006)
The Blogging world is entirely a new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one just beginning to show its power. They’re increasingly forming their own tribes; groups bound together more by affinity and shared interests than by default broadcast and media scheduled spins. The vastly increase choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. The difference between yesterday’s limited choice and today’s abundance is as if our culture was an ocean and the only feature above the surface was islands of news and instant updates.
Our new culture has now shifted from following the controlled-medias to finding our own style and exploring far out beyond the news broadcasting and mainstream media reports, into both relative obscurity and back through time. In a 2005 speech, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch showed that he was the first of the media moguls to grasp the magnitude of today’s elite versus amateur divide: “Young people don’t want to rely on a Godlike figure from above to tell them what’s important,” he said. “They want control over the media, instead of being controlled by it.”
The postwar broadcast era of radio, television and news media are now starting to tatter at the edges. Sales that go with them are not what they once were. Every year network TV and radio stations lose more of its audience. Where had those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the winds as markets fragment into countless niches. The one big growth area is the Web, but it is an uncategorizable sea of million destinations, each defying in its own way the conventional logic of media and marketing. What the internet has done is to allow the people to weave together in a way that amplifies their power and extends their reach. The Web simply unified the elements of a supply-chain revolution that has been brewing for decades. The PC made everyone a producer or publisher, and the internet made everyone its distributors.
The main effect of all this connectivity is unlimited and unfiltered access to culture and content of all sorts, from the mainstream to the farthest fringe of the underground. Today’s children have grown up in a world far less dominated by any of the traditional media and entertainment industries. The cultural landscape is a seamless continuum from high to low, with commercial and amateur content competing equally for their attention. These children don’t distinguish between mainstream Medias and underground niches – they pick what they like from an infinite menu.
The great thing about media and broadcast is that they can bring one piece of news or movie to million of people with unmatchable efficiency. But they can’t bring a million news or shows to one person each. But this is exactly what internet could do and they could do it so well. The shattering of the mainstream media into a zillion different cultural shards is something that upsets traditional media and entertainment.
That first lie to the aphorism that “the power of the press goes to those who own them,” is now put to rest. Now, it’s Blogging that has sparked the renaissance of the amateur publishers. Today, millions of people publish daily for an audience that is collectively larger than any single mainstream media outlet can claim. What sparked Blogging are the democratized tools, the arrival of simple free software and services that made publishing online so easy that anyone could do it.
The consequence of all this is that we’re starting to shift from being passive consumers to active producers. And we’re doing it for the love of it (the word “amateur,” derives from the Latin amator, “lover” from amare, “to love”). We can see it all around us – the extent to which blogs are sharing attention with mainstream media. It’s as if the default setting of production has shifted from “Earned the right to do it” to “what’s stopping you?”
Author Doc Searls call this a shift from consumerism to participative “producerism”:
“The ‘consumer economy’ is a producer-controlled system in which consumers are nothing more than energy sources that metabolize ‘content’ into cash. This is the absolutely corrupted result of the absolute power held by the producers over consumers since producers won the Industrial Revolution.”
Blogging has radically transformed both the marketplace and the economy that thrives on it. The beauty of Blogging is that there is practically no subject so narrow that it can’t have an entry. This is a stark contrast to the mainstream media. With Blogging, we fix and create the contents ourselves. This shift of passive resentment to active participation makes the big difference. To rephrase the old joke about the weather, everybody complains about the spin-doctoring of mainstream media, but now we can do something about it.
However, Blogging entries are ‘non-authoritative’ and in a way, invariably inaccurate. This is inevitable when anyone can write anything, even from nothing. Unlike the mainstream media, each entry is not scrubbed, checked, and labored by responsible professionals (ironically, the mainstream media has now acquired similar characteristics). Each entry is simply conjured from the vacuum.
The debate now is whether the bloggers’ news can be trusted or believed. The answer is not a simple yes or no, because it is the nature of user-created content to be as messy and uncertain at the microscale. It just has to be understood for what it is.
The collective wisdom of millions of bloggers operates on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics – a matter of likelihood rather than certainty. This is a system where nobody is in charge; the intelligence is simply “emergent,” where it arises spontaneously from the number crunching. This is the foundation of our new modern economy, from politics to stock market to Google and there is evidence that our mental software and collective knowledge has evolved faster than ever. The advantage of this system is that the people benefited from the wisdom of the crowd and the bloggers are able to scale both in breadth and depth.
No single blog can be authoritative and it will be a mistake to generalize the quality or nature of its content. But collectively, blogs are proving to be more than an equal to mainstream media. We just need to read more than one of them before making up our own mind as to the accuracy or certainty of the subject matter.
The Weblogs are and will be the ultimate place of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers. Some of them will be great, some will be mediocre, and some will be absolutely crappy. That’s just the nature of the beast.
However, what makes these blogs really extraordinary is that they will improve over time, organically healing itself as if its huge and growing army of tenders were an immune system, ever vigilant and quick to respond to anything that threatens the organism.
Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor writes:
“The exposure culture (of bloggers) reflects the philosophy of the Web, in which getting noticed is everything. Web authors link to each other, quote liberally, and sometimes annotate entire articles. E-mailing links to favorite articles and jokes has become as much a part of our work culture as the water cooler. The big sin in exposure culture is not copying, but instead, failure to properly attribute authorship. And at the center of this exposure culture is the almighty search engines. If your site is easy to find on Google, you don’t sue – you celebrate.”
Blogs have now become the world of “peer production,” the extraordinary internet enabled phenomenon of mass volunteerism and amateurism. We are at the dawn of an age where the main difference between Weblogs and their professional counterparts are simply the shrinking gap in the resources available to them to extend the ambition of their work. When the ultimate tools of production are available to everyone, everyone will become the producer.
2 comments:
Blogging turns the planet into liars' paradise, according to boleh gohmen
good article. v educational. tks dude.
i agree that the internet is now a collective brain of sorts...where our thoughts are stored in a huge database accessible to anyone with internet connection....meme....
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