Fazal Majid's response to my piece on Judith Miller and Citizen Media set me thinking a bit more. Here's what he had to say.
That is an overly rosy view of things. Citizen Media does not have the deep legal pockets of the New York Times behind it, and thus can easily be intimidated by SLAPPs from those in power. For a contrarian view, you should read Andrew Orlowski's excellent article Back in the BlogHouse
One of the important points he makes is that the press lost a lot of its combativity when it went from a working-class, slightly seedy job to an acceptable career choice for college grads.
Citizen Media is a good thing in keeping Big Media honest, but it will probably never have the same capacity for "afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted" (when they are doing their job, that is, unlike the Wen-Ho Lee/Jayson Blair/Judith Miller NYT).
Its been a long time since the press has been anything but a middle class preserve; the "Establishment Press" has been the rule since newspapers began to gain economic power. Even the gutter press was part of the establishment "bread and circuses" programme.
As I suggested it will be interesting to see how those addicted to SLAPP suits will deal with highly distributed and rapidly propagating systems. The economics of threatening to sue one paper or one journo is efficient, having to serve 12,000, or 20,000 bloggers might be another thing.
And I'd be prepared to debate the "afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted" bit too. One of the important factors in the net is that people who felt they were isolated and unique in some way (sometimes very odd ways) have discovered that they have company.
The DSM piece, the Gannon thing, even stuff like icasualties.org have been pretty successful so far at afflicting the comfortable and I can see that getting more effective as time goes on.
I wholly agree with the final point, "WHEN they are doing their job". The real question is whether they will ever get the chance to get back to that job. Rupert Murdoch is not certain, he worries about the news business becoming an "also ran". If he's panicking, that's good enough for me.
Meanwhile, stuff is happening almost faster than I can keep up. Once again the end of privacy gets a spin from CitizenPaine who weighs in with the question
... will we wind up with a Big Brother culture where we can't pick our nose in our car for fear of being humiliated on someone's weblog? Or will the positive aspects of a more transparent society outweigh the Big Brother negatives?
As the privacy backlash grows -- as it surely will in a society where those who don't have blogs still will have camera phones and friends with blogs -- what sort of new standards of law or etiquette will arise?
I think we will learn to live more publicly than we have for the last 200 years in the west. In many communities on this planet, PNG Long Houses spring to mind, the western concept of privacy is laughable. Yet people survive and families thrive.
Our secretive lives may turn out to be an aberration that will be dismantled by the technological processes that created them in the fist place.
The other point is that we will tend to be protected by the very long tail of the Internet Power Law. Our nose-picking may be blogged, but it will probably get buried amongst the much more interesting activities of Janet Jackson, Camilo Mejia, Dave Chappelle, Michael Jackson and Brad Pitt.
While picking our noses may be less than enthralling, with so many cameras taking millions of pictures every day, practically everything is being recorded. Which is making it harder and harder for those prepared to take the law into their own hands.
A mobile phone image has been released showing three men who are wanted for questioning after two friends were stabbed and beaten outside a pub.
David Sayer and Mario Smith were attacked in Lordship Lane, Tottenham, north London, in March after helping the landlord eject three men.
Earlier that evening another friend took a photo of Mr Sayer, which caught the suspects in the background.
When the world is full of witnesses with photographic memories that can be printed out, the world will change.
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