Memetic Horizon

This collaborative innovation is starting to dissolve the distinction between producers and consumers of content – between "us" and "them". This new content is challenging the hegemony of traditional businesses and, as with the Katrina bulletin boards, fulfilling needs typically met by the state.

The author raises the usual questions: "But how can anyone be sure that collaborative content available on the internet is credible? Who owns online content and how can it be used and distributed? And when liability is an issue, who is responsible for it?"

Pitting new media and blogging versus traditional media is a false battle. Both exists in tension, but both need each other now. [No kidding. What am I writing about, an article from the FT, a so-called august publication!] And mainstream experiments are underway. For instance, the LA Times developed wikitorial, an online editorial which readers were invited to rewrite. "The aim was to create a 'constantly evolving collaboration among readers in a communal search for truth.'" This didn't work, unfortunately; it was soon shut down after pornography was being posted. Tant pis. But at least they tried.

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who's the fairest one of all? Morrison also worries about the social balkanization and narcissistic behaviour that can occur if we're only reading and writing about the things we care about or agree with, instead being forced to entertain alternative views and see the world more broadly. Quoting Cass Sunstein from the University of Chicago Law School "Democracy is undermined when people chose to live in echo chambers of their own design." We all have a wicked stepmother in all of us. So far, fortunately, there is little evidence of this -- rather:

The evidence so far suggests that the collaborative creativity on the internet is a powerful equaliser for the masses, even as it poses serious legal, economic and societal challenges both for "us" in the establishment and "them" (the consumers).