Much anticipation in Sydney ahead of the day two keynote, live from New York, courtesy of Skype from respected commentator Jay Rosen. Guest live blogger Paul Farrell managed to post this lively summary and analysis of what was, by any criteria, a powerful and thought-provoking speech. Oh -& the tech all worked beautifully too!
Professor of journalism at New York University Jay Rosen, delivered a powerful talk on the way that new media was transforming the news system. His main initial point was that “the audience isn’t atomized any more, it’s connected horizontally”, and his discussion painted a bright picture about the democratization of information online. The very nature of the way that Jay’s talk was conducted, via webcam, seemed to prove the essence of his point.
But one topic of discussion that proved to be hard to swallow for the audience as they tweeted away was on the topic on filtering, and how “we have to get much better at creating intelligent filters” for information distribution across social media platforms. As soon as the word “filters” was thrown around, the bloggers in the audience collectively raised their hackles.
Jay went on to say that “we can build filters that are much more personalized”, and this tied into one of his other ideas that “transparency is the new objectivity”. New media is credible because of its honesty, and Jay says this is how people gain audiences and responses.
But what are the implications of this? What will happen when filters become more sophisticated and the ways that people view information with social media changes? It seems that this could have some potentially disastrous impacts for the democratization of information on the web.
[...] clearly being felt throughout the audience. After a few cups of coffee, here were my thoughts for Media 140 on the Skype conference with Jay Rosen, Professor of Journalism at New York [...]
Posted by Jay Rosen – ‘Audience Atomization Overcome and the Rebooting of the News System’ « Paul Farrell on November 7th, 2009.
Open media needs filters. Filters are necessary because good open platforms attract lots of conversations. This brings good ’signal’ as well as junk ‘noise’. The challenge is to create open filters that are flexible, transparent and democratic as the open media platforms themselves are. I think this is part of what Rosen means by ‘horizontal connection’.
Posted by John Jacobs on November 9th, 2009.