Monday, March 14, 2011

In cyberspace no one can hear you yawn

Jay Rosen at SXSW on Saturday, trying to heal the rift between bloggers and legit hacks, announced: “It’s one internet. The news system now incorporates the people formerly known as the audience.”

Which is all well and lovely, but if the audience isn’t the audience any more, who are we talking to?

5 comments:

LC said...

The audience is still the audience - they're just talking back now. And when I say 'talking' I mean 'angrily bashing out poorly considered arguments with the caps-lock on and the spell-checker off'.

This is the internets, and that's how we troll.

Charles Edward Frith said...

As in any conversation there's a time to listen and a time to talk.

Tim F said...

But are they talking back, LC? What proportion of people who (for example) read a story on the Guardian site actually bother to answer back? How many know how? (Only a few weeks ago, Jimmy Wales was saying that many Wikipedia users don't have the technical knowhow/confidence to make amendments.) I still reckon the majority of people aren’t mucking in.

And a time to say "Please excuse me, I really need to pee", Charles.

Garth said...

As ever: we are talking to ourselves

Sam said...

This conversation fallacy is a terribly awkward cul de sac.

Blogging was a free for all five or six years ago, but now the top people are still established media types. The same has happened with twitter and I'll wager over any future net tech that becomes mainstream.

People want to listen to experts, not their neighbours.