It takes a village to be a newspaper
: In a wonderful comment under a post below, Bala Pillai of Maylasia.net pointed to an interview that has an eloquent expression of what news should be — a parallel to Hugh McLeod‘s oft-quoted (by me) contention that newspapers must stop thinking of themselves as things but as places where people come together to do good things. Bala Pillai:
I remember in my village where I grew up in Malaysia. When there was no media there. When we needed to find out what was happening in the neighboring village. Weíd send one of us over. Heíd go over. And talk to the headman. Get the party platform from him. And on his way back he’d go have a haircut at that village’s barber. And there he’d get the grapevine. And between the two versions he narrates to us…See that was media for us that were news….
See what matters most to the village = media ok the reason is this… media used to be equal to community… because what mattered most to community equaled to the community… and what mattered most = media = community, as time went on, specialists creeped in… And in time the agency phenomena took over. Agency phenomena = agents become principals (another e.g. –> govt servants become masters) and thus media diverged from community. Media no more represented community. Nature abhors these divergences. It pushes towards equilibrium. So there was pressure to have facilities to enable this convergence and thus social software and citizen journalism
Beautifully put.
