TH!NK ABOUT IT - european blogging competition 2009 » Blog Archive » Margot Wallström Guest blog post
Is blogging not about having a conversation? Why has there been no response to the many excellent points made above? If the EU thinks that blogging is just another one way street to propagandise the masses they are making a serious mistake. You have to engage with people and address their points - otherwise we are all wasting our time here.
You can see this as evidence of dysfunctional, or perhaps non functional, media. Or you can see it for what it is - which is another example of democratic deficit.
Blogs are noisy people-driven media. Professional media aren't noisy. They're not just Serious™ - which is a good antonym for noisy and tainted by messy emotion - but they're also relentlessly on-message.
In media-speak blogs are many-to-many, the MSM is one-to-many. The one-to-many model, where a single source coherently repeats and promotes opinions, is inherently undemocratic.
The real point of media isn't to get people listening to politicians, lobbyists and experts, it's to get politicians, lobbyists and experts listening to and talking back to people.
On that criterion, all of the MSM get a fail - because the real job of the MSM, as and when debate appears to happen, is to reflect and shape the opinions of policy makers. The strict monopoly on strategy held by these people excludes anyone who isn't already on the inside.
In the context of the meltdown, it's useful to remember that the crash was visible ahead of time to almost everyone who wasn't a media or political leader.
So the best you'll get from the MSM is manufactured scandals like the MP and MEP expenses story - which appear populist, but in fact are perfectly timed to herd the electorate like sheep in a useful direction.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
This is a crucial distinctions between modes of communication, telephony and its engineering in particular.
Whether or not one wants to characterize a broadcaster "undemocratic" is a trivial matter in consideration of structural barriers which physically prevent "everyman" competing with MSM publishers to broadcast messages to a finite audience.
That is send/receive capacity (a/k/a mbps) assigned by subscriber class (data/voice/video, commercial/personal) by ICT-type (fiber/copper/satellite/radio) of carrier or operator. Isn't it odd, one can always receive twice as much as one can send?
The net-neutrality crew tends to promote the bane of content censorship over property exclusions. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
We're still waiting for even an acknowledgement.
the parties want more votes for the wrong reasons, ie, to put lipstick on the pig of their voter-apathy numbers.
if they did want to do something very positive for many people, i suspect they wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the levers of power... yet. another generation or two, as others have suggested here.
there are just enough intelligent ones allowed in, to make the others' average rise to....average.
a lot of them are just functionaries for lobbyists. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
