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Friday, May 3, 2002
Mediaism 
| | Doc's got a thing against the term media, which I don't fully get. (We're surrounded by media: not just the big media of network tv, newspapers and AOL Time Warner, but personal media: my Walkman and iPod; MyYahoo; my Mac G4's iTunes and iPhoto; my BabyCenter newsletter about my 3-year-old. And, yes, my blog.) |
| | It's not that I've got a thing against media. It's that I think it's time we began to unpack the differences between media and journals, and between the isms of both. So let's do that. |
| | Ask anybody on the street what The Media are, and they won't say "journals." They'll list publishing and broadcasting categories: newspapers, radio, magazines and television — the things J.D. called "big media" in the paragraph above. To most people big media and the media are one and the same, while the rest of the stuff J.D. lists are all something else. (Yes, McLuhan called everything a "medium" for "information," including light bulbs. But most of us still don't know what he was talking about.) |
| | How we understand "the media" is made clear by how we use the term. When we say we want to "get in front of the media," or "talk to the media" or "develop a media strategy," we are not talking about journalism. We are talking about an information manufacturing and distribution system. |
| | The Media is a big industrial cagegory that broadly includes broadcasting and publishing, which in turn break down to local and network TV, cable, radio, newspapers, magazines and so on. |
| | Some publishing categories include journals. And some TV and radio programs practice a form of journalism. But journals are a relatively small part of The Media as a whole, and journalism is a significant but secondary part of The Media's value system. |
| | Yet until recently we could safely speak about media and journals and journalism as if they were all kind of the same thing, because nearly all the journals worthy of the noun were categorically included among The Media. |
| | Not any more. Weblogs are journals in the literal sense of the noun, and there are millions of them. It's possible that the vast majority of the world's journals are no more than a few clicks away from the one you're reading now. |
| | And what are we doing with our journals? Nothing a whole lot different than what Ben Franklin started doing with Poor Richard's Almanac a quarter millennium ago. |
| | I beleive Poor Richards Almanac was the first blog, and that all we're doing is finishing the job Franklin started. One word for that job is The Enlightenment. |
| | (Blog software authors are the Gutenbergs of our day. Take one to lunch.) |
| | Take the issue of the CARP threat to Internet radio, which few in the mainstream press have covered at much depth at all. The best print pieces, in fact, are in small independent newspapers that maintain easily-linked-to archives, such as this one at Spectator magazine in Raliegh, North Carolina. If you want to find where the most light is being shed on the subject, look on the Web. Most of it is either on a blog or at a site with plenty of inbound links from blogs. |
| | (Significantly, the sum of pro-CARP journalizing on the Web just about rounds to zero, which tells you how well those who would regulate the Net truly understand it.) |
| | As for webblogs, if the big media cover the subject at all, it's as a "phenomenon," which is to say an epiphenomenon. That's because big media journalism is preoccupied with stories, which tend to be transient. Hardly a week goes by when some reporter doesn't ask me if blogs haven't been "overhyped," or to try to make me take sides against bigtime journalism, as if there's some kind of war going on. |
| | But the real war isn't between blogs and journals. It's between journalism and mediaism. |
| | The Web is about journalism, and has been since it was born. It's no coincidence that we "author" something called "pages" that we "publish" on the Web. |
| | The Media are not about journalism, except as a subordinate concern. They are about publishing and broadcasting, which are both about distribution. |
| | That's why it's no coincidence that when Big Media (and .com wannabe Big Media) saw the Web, they took everything we used to call "art," "editorial," "music," and "news" — and recharacterized it all as "content." Because "content" is something you ship, something you distribute. It's not necessarily something you share. |
| | The principles of journalism are well understood because there have been many excellent journals and journlalistic organizations wroking in the world for may years. Whatever their shortcomings, the New York Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, PBS, NPR, the New Yorker and countless smaller outfits (my favorite is a little "magazine of ideas" called The Sun) primarily exist to practice good journalism, and they do a very good job a lot of the time. |
| | The principles of mediaism, however, are not yet well understood, even though we could hardly be more familiar with them. |
| | To begin understanding them, I sugggest we start by visiting Michael Wolff's latest This Media Life column in New York Magazine. Michael is a terrific journalist. But his subject is something else. |
Dysadhominemia
Speaking of high
Interesting: Don Henley is one of the letter signers.
| | If you're looking for the pro-CARP view on Webcasting (a hen's tooth here in Webland), Soundexchange is the place to go. It urges you to "Tell Congress the Truth about Webcasting Rates" — with a downloadable .pdf. |
What's the opposite of a mistake? Just wondering.
| | My space mistake is a very interesting piece by Sheila Lennon, a Providence, Rhode Island, journalist whose terrific blog is Subterranean Homepage News (subtitled 'Bottom-up' journalism from the pros). A sample: |
| | The next generation of whole-earth photos were to have come from Triana, a satellite that would photograph a full-color, continuous view of the entire sunlit face of the rotating Earth every 15 minutes for display on the Web, but it's sitting in storage in an aluminum box in the corner of Building 7 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. |
| | Her piece is the story of how politics keeps Triana on the ground, even though she's ready to fly. It's a terrific feature (you know, like one you'd read in the paper), with about thirty links in the text. |
| | Sheila's so hard not to read that I just added her to the blogrolodex. |
Extra Sensory Deception
| | Yes, I now know the trick behind this test here, thanks to countless readers, starting with Elliot Landrum back on Wednesday. I thought I had blogged something about it, but apparently I tricked myself or something. |
| | A number of people told me it was an "old" trick, but hell, I'm old and I don't remember ever seeing it before. But then... there are a lot of things I don't remember. |
Go refigure
Creepy
| | Discovered this in my referer logs. |
Look up
| | Heavens Above is by far my favorite Web site these days. Every night my kid and I use it to pinpoint every satellite that passes overhead in the early evening. It's an amazing piece of work. |
| | I also love the thoughts of Jack Handy, who says, "Whether they find a life there or not, I think Jupiter should be called an enemy planet." And "I don't think I'm alone when I say I'd like to see more and more planets fall under the ruthless domination of our solar system." |
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