We live in a world overflowing with information. The internet's largest problem is organization of data - as Google has certainly embraced. Take a step back to a world before the modern explosion of data, and you'll see publishers ruled the information world. They were the curators of thought and the best actually were pretty impartial. The NY Times became huge by impartial coverage with its motto of "All the news that's fit to print". What great market dynamics to select the most truthful news source. This was needed at the time because there was no possible way of coordinating thought.
Widespread consolidation took place in media during the 20th Century. People in the 1960's had only a few channels of radio and TV, and newspapers like The Times were very trust as the sole sources of truth. Today though these people still remain and hold massive influence, however their days are certainly numbered in their current form. Information can no longer be best created and allocated in this way. We're entering a new period of media.
Unlike social media cheerleaders though, I don't think the NYT is going to be dead in 5 years, but certainly they will have to change their role. The issue is that their place as "the" source is being widely questioned and of course their business model is being eroded by free and high quality online media.
Without these organizations though, people argue that we'll be unable to know the truth. They say blogs feed off of the mass media. This is certainly true in that many blogs comment on the news, however I wouldn't mistake their commenting on the news as just following their lead. There are more and more sources of news, and indeed any user of Twitter has gotten the news before the mainstream media. Mass media still has the greatest ability to influence our daily thoughts and hence what bloggers think to talk about, however that role is diminishing.
With the democratization of news comes the need to filter the information for truth and relevance. Sites like Digg, Reddit and SlashDot certainly find interesting and very often more relevant news than the mainstream media, however they're still highly susceptible to group-think. Critics point this out, however look no further than Fox News to find extreme group-think "news", and the same is true on the left. CNN, etc. all have a progressive bias, and both groups assume the narrative of the establishment - just both sides of it.
Aside from these mature sites, there are other new concepts at filtering the torrent of online information. People talked about the semantic web knowing being able give great results based on a truer meaning of our queries, but we've not been able to realize this as of yet - and probably won't for a long time. Instead, we're seeing social answers to the questions of organization: Wikipedia, Twitter Lists, Ardvark etc. are all great examples of how we can filter reality.
We can see that new forms of media are providing smoother allocation of events and ideas, however we're still at the mercy of group think. What keeps us from just seeking news that fits with our current view? This is a question that worries me the most. Online sources will doubtlessly provide more / more relevant info, but we still don't see many (any?) opposing view points on news sites like Politico or Huffington Post.
Before, we were told to look towards trusted sources - almost an act of blind faith. Today, we don't have that luxury. A major skill (habit?) we need to cultivate is the ability to decompose sources into facts and opinion, search for truth, form the most likely view, and update as new info surfaces. I'm not sure exactly how to do this - it could be an innate problem of humanity. If we can though, it will change the public discourse. This will change the outcomes, and those will change the world.
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