Blogging, Journalism & Credibility
From comment I left
at the webcred blog, a bit reworked for this blog post:
“It is a set of assumptions that left undistinguished will keep the stage set as it always was and thus who gets to speak and what gets to be said is predictable and inline with those assumptions, thus credibility is predefined as a unalterability of the stage sets”
As David Weinberger mentions 'The Web is a World' yet I think many people's upsets about your conference may be pointing to their grievances that you speak outside of this world in your private bunker by invitation only. The conversation you get to have is yours and on your terms. I didn’t see yet in these comments anyone addressing the fact that on the web you don’t get to control a dialog, you don’t get to control who speaks.
Perhaps this is a bit unsettling that the conference hasn’t started yet but the community is already engaged in it (even if not invited) and you probably don’t’ even know why (You do want to wake up to this fact, I beg you please.)
I like Tom’s comment where he does point to this “getting beyond this certain resistance to your aspirations derived from the formulations of your intents”
In formulating your intent could you have been a bit blind to the set of assumptions that directed your formulations? It would be a great conference to distinguish those assumptions first to see what other intent formulating could come out of this.
Parting thought on this conference’s shared motivation
“that the world of journalism is being transformed by blogging”
- I would like to think that blogging is not transforming journalism as we have come to know, a method of informing us of things that occur. In the context of method; blogging is irrelevant since it lives in a domain of commitment to reporting things that matter. Journalism has made sure it’s factual and unbiased and objective yet has forgotten that it is supposed to be a ‘Voice of what matters to our community’; in being objective and factual Journalism has lost its commitment to building our common life and expanding our common future. Blogging is recreating the commitment. Journalism may want to notice that.
I do write this with my assumption that Journalism has become a distribution system for information, a News Shipping Business whose credibility was on how fast it can inform us (as Doc Searls says “Inform is like Forming another person") without ever reflecting on Forms it’s stuffing us into. With Blogging we have created an alternative distribution for information. This perhaps is why we don’t care about Journalism any more. Journalists have become irrelevant, brokers of commodity with value approaching zero.
So to sum it up I shall quote from your ‘About’ page:
"What are the areas of common ground shared by these very different approaches (note: meaning blogging and journalism) to handling news and information?".
Wow. Look at what you are asking. You are predetermining here quite broadly that blogging is ‘handling news and information’. Perhaps a peek at the guts of the beast might reveal that blogging is foremost about giving voice to what matters to us. The fact that it’s in digital form and based on links makes us connect our concerns into a shared network of human beings caring about what’s happening to us. Handling news and information is not the name of this game.
