Terry Heaton has some observations from a recent NYC meeting of Online
Mediarati. Besides noting that there were few people of color or women, Terry noted that Andrew Heyward of CBS made the observations that:
- The illusion of omniscience is out of date, this idea that everything has an answer and that there's one truth.
- The notion that journalism with a point-of-view is an acceptable form.
Coming from the Heyward, these were pretty noteworthy.
Terry goes on to say that Jay Rosen made one of the points that many in the audience may have been unable to understand
Jay Rosen said something terribly important that (imo) went over the heads of most people in the room. He said the nature of authority is changing in our culture, and that this directly impacts all media. He used the example of a person who goes to the doctor and gets a prescription for an ailment. The doctor explains how the medication will work. The patient then proceeds to the drugstore and receives the medicine, along with (perhaps) an explanation from the pharmacist about how the medicine will work. But then the patient goes home and gets on the internet to research the thoughts of others who've used the medicine to discover what THEY think about how it works, and this impacts the doctor's authority. The doctor is still the doctor, but gone is the automatic acceptance of his or her words as gospel. This is new in our world, and I couldn't agree more. It's the major challenge of all institutional authority, and it's one of the truly fascinating things about a culture drifting into postmodernism.
That's what news is about these days.
Tim Porter: A New York State of Mind writes about the same conference and what was said there.
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