View source for Blogging as Distributed Activity



=Discussion=

David de Ugarte:

“In the new reticular structure of information the centre of journalism is no longer the writing of copy, the conversion of information from fact into news which used be the purpose of journalists. Rather, what matters now is the selection of sources which are anyway immediately and directly available to the reader. This is what most blogs do, as do, by definition, press-clipping services. Their contribution consists in selecting sources from a certain point of view. In the same way as it makes no longer sense to understand newspapers as “newsmakers”, so opinion is no longer based on the best information attributed to an individual, as the network makes sources available to everyone. What is important now is interpretation and analysis – that is, the deliberative component which signals the appearance of a truly public, nonindustrially mediated, citizens' sphere.

This is one more aspect of the most characteristic result of the development of the distributed network society: the expansion of our personal autonomy with respect to the establishment. We become more autonomous, for instance, when we can write our own blog and establish a medium and source relationship with others, becoming a part of that collective newspaper which we all make every morning with our web browser tags. That is, the network allows us to act socially on a certain scale, bypassing the mediation of external institutions – in fact, it allows us to act as “individual institutions” and, in that sense, to become much freer and to acquire many more options.

In practice, the emergence of a pluriarchic information sphere, which is what the blogosphere, the identity aggregators and the new personal pressclipping services roughly amount to, is a real process whereby power is reorganised into a distributed information structure. We are living in the early days of a new media environment which, due to its very architecture, guarantees access to information in a more robust way.” (http://deugarte.com/gomi/the-power-of-networks.pdf) 


Source: the book, The [[Power of Networks]]. David de Ugarte.


[[Category:Media]]

[[Category:P2P Theory]]

[[Category:Articles]]