Will We Have Pack Blogging or Wisdom of Crowds?
Aldon Hynes, who I met at the Journalism that Matters unconference in Memphis, has a thoughtful post entitled: Pack blogging, journalism, and sense making. In it there are a series of questions we should all be pondering:
It seems as…extracting the wisdom of the crowd may be part of this ’sense-making’ that everyone tells me new journalism is supposed to be about. Will we see new packs of bloggers along old packs of journalism? Will this give us a wider perspective and enable our sense-making? Should we be trying to prevent new packs from forming? Are there other ways of extracting meaning from the wisdom of crowds?
His short blog post seems much more sensible than the rant by Andrew Keen in his book The Cult of the Amateur. Here is an excerpt from a CNET.com article:
“If we keep up this pace, there will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite, that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary. These days, kids can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com.”
I have not read the book so I don’t want to call him a jerk — yet, but I do want to remind him and everyone else that even before the Internet 500 million people still had opinions that they shared every day with their friends and neighbors. Of course, lots of elitist snobs, including journalists, my past self included, believe as Keen does that the masses have a tendency toward “corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture.” Which is another way of saying only a chosen few really understand politics, commerce, arts and culture. Which is another way of saying that these elitist snobs are indeed a bunch of jerks.
