Here's the thing with this... I kinda like the world it's painting for me, even though it appears to be against it right at the end. There is those old media voices that keep screaming about "journalistic integrity" and "unbiased reporting" and claim that the new media (blogs, youtube...) cannot have that and are only extended editorials (opinions). It is my contention that the illusion of unbiased reporting has finally been tossed away. I ONLY read from the internet, and I only read from trused sources... Sources I KNOW are biased, but whom I know have a similar worldview as me. With old media, one couldn't be certain what their politics were unless one dug deep. Now we can be sure.

 

i would argue that reading new media often makes it more difficult to find someone's biases. it's easy to read the wall street journal and believe rupert murdock is in some way biasing the news, or at least that the story may be slanted to the side of the capital-heavy, but you also know that the wall street journal has the resources to check facts and the prerogative to present different sides of the story. this is the power of a news brand. it's not perfect, but it's easier to see the biases there than to understand the personal issues of every blogger you read. and it also goes back to whether you believe the news media by its very nature is "manufacturing consent" or whether editors are there for quality control. (admittedly not mutually exclusive).

until a system of trust is built into the nature of new media and blogging, similar to the way we rank users on ebay, we won't know who to trust. i see the future of the internet a lot like the way the Chinese saw the accumulation of virtue. you act virtuously and you are rewarded with more power that only the virtuous can wield. you act honestly and you get honest responses. you write with authority and you are rewarded as an authority. what this video means to me is that the future of the internet will be a trust economy, not an attention economy.

but who knows? tomorrow's lumpen proletariat may just be the ones whose jobs are made obsolete by the relentless march of progress, and they're the ones going to be uploading cute videos of their chinchillas to youtube. do they care where their entertainment comes from? or do they want more than entertainment?

i want to read al gore's new book on the breakdown of reason in debate. the internet is certainly bringing us back to the text-based world of facts laid down mostly logically on "paper" but the web is fast transitioning to a world of video responses as well. we just have more control over which sound bites we hear and for how long. it's a great and exciting time to be alive.