Cut off one head, and ten-100 new ones sprout in its place. Now THAT is truly beautiful.

bob wyman

My point is simply that, as bad as it is, social media is probably better than much of what passes for journalism.

We don’t know which members of the Washington press corp are married to folks in govt or big biz. We didn’t know that CNN was self-censoring their Iraq coverage to avoid antagonizing Saddam Hussein. We don’t know when a newspaper publishes a rewritten press release. We don’t know the qualifications of “experts” quoted. We don’t know when “unnamed sources” are cranks pissed because they didn’t get a promotion.

I can go on and on. Journalists aren’t seen as less credible than used car dealers because of the latter’s stellar behavior…. (I exclude sports and society reporters from that criticism because their reporting is significantly closer to reality.)

The alternative to the social media isn’t perfection, it’s the crap-fest called journalism.

Unfortunately, as Jeff has said, the site is revolutionizing the world. People live on that site and take what is said as fact when most of the comments are not. The site however is very useful for marketing a business and has brought a lot of traffic to my site. So in the end i have to say it does more good than harm for me and therefore i am a fan.

And that Greenpeace exercise in achieving a wish by pretending it is a fact frightens me. I admit part of my mind is of the “environmentalists are trying to push us back to the Stone Age” school.

There is no such thing as real anarchy. In any amorphous body something/ somebody will always rise to the top. Maybe cream, maybe scum (maybe just a transient effect of Brownian motion). But watch their motives whatever you perceive them to be.

But take Shirky’s example about Obama’s net neutrality issue: he skims over the fact that the “hive mind” didn’t succeed. Why? Because they were painted as a fringe group with a political opinion that had gravitational pull. Almost anything can attract thousands of supporters on the internet (cf. 9/11 consipracy theories, for instance). There’s a fine line between collaborative, “real-time” reporting and “mob mentality.”

Paranoia aside, any government can create Twitter account and start tweeting like a twit. And spread misinformation and disinformation. There’s not a single country in the world that doesn’t have a black-ops operation of some capacity. Even if it be that Iraqi general who said there were no tanks in Iraq even as tanks rolled behind him in the picture. Be careful and skeptical.