by Sven Triloqvist
Fri Nov 19th, 2010 at 12:07:51 PM EST
Media organisations are trying various routes to the future - the Guardian's is firmly an open and collaborative one
An excellent and longish article in the Guardian today: The splintering of the fourth estate. The article is an edited transcript of the Andrew Olle lecture 2010 given by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in Sydney, Australia on 19 November.
So many good points are made that to fair quote a bit of it would not do it justice. I recommend you read the whole article.
But maybe a few tasters:
Gutenberg's invention made the soil from which sprang modern history, science, popular literature, the emergence of the nation-state, so much of everything by which we define modernity
We are travelling through a period of extreme change faster than our corporate bodies can cope with. It's painful - and, if not treated quickly and correctly, can be fatal.
I want to discuss the possibility that we are living at the end of a great arc of history, which began with the invention of moveable type.
"Much of what we call communication is, necessarily, no more in itself, than transmission; that is to say, a one-way sending." (a quote from 1958)
The BBC is still the finest news operation in the world. How does it do it? Through subsidy.
Now subsidy also gets a bad press. But, in reality, few of us are in a good position to ridicule subsidy.
The American essayist Walter Lippmann, in his famous 1922 book, Public Opinion, made it plain that the press could not live without the subsidy of advertising.
There's much more. Go read.
