Pixelated media… grainy reality… low-res news
: Not only is the world changing in this war, news is.
And technology is changing it.
Watch TV news now and you see grainy, pixelated, jumpy, low-res images that would have been cause for dismissal for a network producer only a year or two ago. But now these images from the front imply immediacy, even credibility: They look real, they look now, they look like news.
Now add to this the fact that reporters — and now even members of the audience — can carry the devices that create those images. If I had carried a phone with a camera attached and text-messaging capabilities on September 11th, I would have been reporting (or you can call it blogging) to the world.
Now add one more factor — the always-connected, international, everywhere network in which we now live — and you have the shape of news to come: from anywhere to anywhere anytime by anybody.
Oh, but there’s one more dimension to add: opinion. People will pick their spin. In Britain, people pick the Mirror or the Sun (or the Times or the Guardian). That doesn’t happen in a one-outlet local market. But it does happen in a diverse national market, like Britain, and it will happen in a diverse nanomedia market, with weblogs.
So we’ll get more news from more sources and more perspectives, more up-to-the-minute with more reality from the scene and more perspective later.
I like that picture.
(So does Corey Bergman, a local TV guru who created the wonderful weblog Lost Remote and who wrote about all this for OJR).
