Plugged in: Out with old media; in with... what? - Jan. 19, 2006

Nice look at where we are going in media land. I love blogs, blogging and the independent nature of the whole thing. The theory is that with so many different voices out there, people have the opportunity to access many different points-of-view.

Well, they may have the opportunity but they don't do it. The decay of the MSM is I fear leading to a balkanization of thought on the net.

Here is the money quote... ready both paragraphs:

But it [loss of MSM] can also mean a loss of shared experience, of common reference points for a society. This has to be part of the explanation for the increasingly polarized state of political discourse in the United States: Partisans of both left and right are now able to assemble media diets that almost never contradict their preconceived views.

This is not an unprecedented state of affairs -- big American cities used to have lots of different newspapers, each with pronounced political leanings and articles explicitly shaded to reinforce those leanings. There is nothing natural or inherently superior about the monolithic media institutions of the mid-to-late 20th century.



Plugged in: Out with old media; in with... what? - Jan. 19, 2006