Through the power of the link, someone I’ve never heard of riffs on the discussion this weekend about product v. process journalism from an artist’s perspective, adding this:
Think about the change from the camera in the 19th century to the projector in the 20th. The camera framed objects, alluded to three dimensions, stilled time. The projector blasted synthesis – one frame negating another and at eye blinking speed. We may think of blogging as the result of another technological frontier not unlike the camera and the projector.
A newspaper by its very nature stills time; states the fact wrapped in the eternity of print – it is a moment of truth stilled. A blog is more akin to the projector: the movement itself. Recording the changes of truth over time. Revisionist, processing, excluding and incorporating.
But what of the truth the blog seeks? In art that truth is the thing that is coming into being, it is intertwined with the perceivor.
When we discuss in blogs the movement from rumor to not rumor, when one moment’s truth collides with the next, what is the truth? Where does it end? When does it become fact?
If the truth must be corrected – wouldn’t the truth finally have to be the sum total of process AND product? Shouldn’t it be a document of changes which tells the truth about editing, as well as about the information being edited? And wouldn’t it imply information is only momentarily true. That the end of a story doesn’t have to do with truth it has to do with interest or the loss thereof?
