Hitting the Radar Screen of the New Media Movement
The Echo Chamber Project has hit the radar screens of some of the leaders of the New Media movement. Rebecca MacKinnon posted a link to my New Media Ecosystem and Dave Weinberger picks it up.
Here's an e-mail that I just sent to Rebecca.
- Thanks Rebecca.
I orginally wanted to get my ideas to the people at this conference through you speaking to them, but I know that it'll get to them through these two blog posts.
Not only that, but these blog posts will trickle down to everyone else who is concerned about New Media issues.
It'll trickle down the blogospheric foodchain and the ball will get rolling with more Drupal developers and other help from citizens to help start putting these theories into practice.
It doesn't really matter now if you tell the conference participants my ideas or not -- The ideas are out there now with a permanent URL and you've passed a fraction of your credibility off to The Echo Chamber.
The new commodity of the future is trust and credibility, and you've done more for me and my open source documentary with your blog post than you could have done by simply passing along my comment to these conference participants -- or if I would have been at the conference to pitch my ideas face-to-face.
Your voucher of trust will bring more people to my collaborative project than any advocacy pitch that I could've ever made myself.
I've gained enough trust in you, a lot of other people trust you, and people will come to me to see if my ideas are interesting or not. If they're not, then you lose trust. If they are, then you gain trust. The blogosphere is based upon symbiotic relationships.
Decentralization is about grassroots and change coming from the bottom-up. This gathering of institutional authorities on the media aren't going to find the answers because they're still mostly trapped in the limited paradigms of centralization, He Said / She Said objectivity, inverted pyramid style reporting, quantitative reductionism, and linear and narrative-style news reporting.
Decentralization, a multitude of voices, stories preferenced on strongest predictive theories of reality and not official sources, a balance of quantitative and qualitiative methods of inquiry, and the integration of non-linear communications capacities of the Internet as a means for increasing the working memory of journalists and analysts who will always be presenting narrative news stories to the masses.
