Reality-check:
It's often assumed that the Net will improve our understanding of what's happening elsewhere in the world. But the report indicates that rather than expanding coverage of foreign stories, citizen-edited sites only reduce it further ... The study is, as the researchers note, just a snapshot, but it's a telling one. It shows us what happens when you put a crowd in charge of selecting news. The techno-utopians would have use believe that citizen journalism will provide an antidote to the mainstream media's long-run shift away from hard news and toward soft news, that it will counter the trend toward news-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-news. But the indication so far is that the precise opposite is true. When you replace professional editors with a crowd or a social network, you actually end up accelerating the dumbing-down of news. News becomes a stream of junk-food-like morsels. The people formerly known as the audience may be more accurately termed the people formerly known as informed.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The people formerly known as informed
Have you been reading Digg again? I see that Lamborghini has a new million-euro car they're showing...
Posted by: Nathan Gilliatt | September 12, 2007 at 09:17 PM