Blog Post Assignment #2

Welcome to Blog Post#2, brought to you by the number 3 and the letter Q. Today’s question reads:

Social media has allowed everyday citizens to become authors, editors, and publishers of news and information. Do you believe that social media has increased the quality of news and information or decreased it?

Let’s begin with the first assumption, shall we?

Social media has not allowed citizens to become authors- people with something to say have always printed off their opinions at the local Kinko’s, or in Canada, Mailboxes Etc. If they couldn’t afford that, stolen sandwich signs worn over clothes not washed in months was usually enough to get the point across. Social media is just the most seamless platform to do it with- like telepathy, your opinions are effortlessly shown to everyone in the world.

Of course, just because they’re available doesn’t mean they’re viewed.

Second assumption is that there is a noticeable change, good or bad, in the overall quality of the writing. Of course there isn’t. Since the first cave paintings, most of what’s being written down is heavily distorted in the facts, total fabrication or both.

People think that the Internet is the ultimate Marxism- bringing the means of production to the masses at large while the corporations scramble to keep up, like a bear trying to out-corner a mouse. In certain ways, this is true- microbusinesses and enter-preneurial (online entrepreneurial start-ups) have sprung up all over the place in the last 10 years, and have made more people rich, happy or both than any other radical social change.

Where it falls apart is in pure information. The irony so tart it makes your lips wrinkle. On Microsoft paying people to change Wikipedia entries to show it in a more positive light, Stephen Colbert said, “When money determines Wikipedia entries, reality has become a commodity.” (See the video here)

This breakdown is due to faulty perception- people thought that the previous publishing system had a built-in quality control (which it didn’t) and that the Internet is patrolled by some vaguely-defined fact police (It’s not) that keeps everything real.

The old system was akin to a furnace- it didn’t care what was consumed as long as it continued being fed. Anything if it would sell was published. Ever picked up a Harlequin romance? Grocery store tabloid? Twilight? All of it was printed to buy time to find the next thing to be printed, and so on, and so forth. Even before the printing press, the written word was garbage. In a time when all Bibles were in Latin, thousands of Catholic priests could not read their own native language, much less one based in Rome.

The new system is more akin to a landslide from a cattle farm. There’s a lot of stuff, its coming towards you at a stunning rate, and most of it’s manure.

Bottom line? Language was only ever intended to stop communication, not foster it. We get 80% of the speaker’s meaning from body language, 15% from tone, and 5% from the actual words spoken. Thus when you create a medium that does away with 95% of context, what are you left with?

Social media only changes the quantity of information. The quality level was set long ago.