Journalists are now utilizing web 2.0 technology as a means of collaborating with other journalists. Halfway between Wikipedia and the blogosphere, the Center for Media and Democracy’s project SourceWatch is a collaborative directory of people, organizations, and issues shaping public life. It’s key focuses include tracking the activities of PR firms that specialize in manipulating public perception, profiling think tanks, nonprofits, and other political organizations, and documenting the other various actors (media outlets, journalists, politicians, etc) involved in public debate.
Check it out here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=SourceWatch
CongressPedia is a side project of SourceWatch which profiles members of Congress, keeps tabs on legislation in the Senate and House, and focuses especially on members of Congress who are under investigation. Organizations and journalists are encouraged to post their research and reporting, and the mass of accumulated knowledge is a good educational tool for students, teachers, and other interested individuals. In Habermasian terms, sites like these are ways to advance public reason on specific issues – in this case, journalism & the public sphere – as they sustain and encourage discussion, and allow participants to synthesize the collected information in a collective forum.
Accessible here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Congresspedia
Unlike some other wiki sites, SourceWatch and CongressPedia have a policy of strict referencing (as in, you gotta be able to back up what you’re saying) and are overseen by a paid editor who has added authority over additions and revisions. Though this does make the wiki’s discussion somewhat less democratic, it does alleviate the problems of inaccuracy and bias suffered by other wikis; only posts that are well-researched and appropriately referenced are allowed. While the quantity of participants may be lower due to these restrictions, the quality of discussion is presumably higher.
So what is more important to a democratic media? Is it better to have a more democratic structure with less reliable reporting? Or a less democratic structure with more reliable reporting? The latter is prevalent in the status quo (think intellectual authority: the supremacy of encyclopedia authors). Sites like the two referenced above represent a democratization of hte status quo, though not a full democratization (in lines with Wikipedia’s not-quite-realized ideals of free culture). But opening up reporting for discussion with other reporters and researchers (if not the public at large) is definitely a move in the right direction.
July 11th, 2008 at 5:09 am
So what is more important to a democratic media? Is it better to have a more democratic structure with less reliable reporting? Or a less democratic structure with more reliable reporting?
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False dillemma. Its better to solve the problems in a real way
and have genuine democracy.
Like all forms of useful anarchy, functional democracy requires
a set of functional base rules which make the thing work.
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The latter is prevalent in the status quo (think intellectual authority: the supremacy of encyclopedia authors). Sites like the two referenced above represent a democratization of the status quo, though not a full democratization (in lines with Wikipedia’s not-quite-realized ideals of free culture).
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I’d have to say that Wikipedia represents fully the worst case scenario. It LOOKS democratic, and it LOOKS transparent, but in fact, its both hyper controlled and has its own ways of spiriting facts off to never- never- land, deleting things, and kicking anybody who knows the truth off of the site.
Its orwellian prophecy in perfect form; a long winded propaganda war.
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But opening up reporting for discussion with other reporters and researchers (if not the public at large) is definitely a move in the right direction.
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Sure it moves in theory in the right direction. But if you free up social and mental energy in one direction and clamp down in the other, all you have is the same old mind traps with much more clever trappings.
The proof of this is most apparent if you are an expert in something. Try telling MyBO that geothermal power can meet all of our energy needs and that biofuels and nuclear power are just corporate swine non answers. HE NEEDS the solution, and if he
had it, it would be checkmate to the political BS. But the people running his board are message control chimps, and all they see
is “loud and noisy.” and then they hit the deltete button.
Try talking to wikipedia about psychonautics. Your actually talking to a bunch of cultural misapropriationists whos new justification for doing drugs is that they picked up a book on shamanism from the book store.
They don’t want the inconvenient or deeper truths, and they don’t want an expert to tell them the difference between their pet assumptions, and reality as it is.
Until pack psychology and mob psychology and egotism are confronted and social entropy is stopped by GOOD RULES,
we are still in the age of propaganda, not the age of information,
and still living an orwellian approximation of democracy, not a democracy.
July 22nd, 2008 at 10:07 am
Point taken – I didn’t mean to glorify wikipedia as much as I have been in this blog so far – I hope that my latest post more clearly defines my views on Wikipedia, especially on its limitations.
Clearly web 2.0′s accessibility has opened some sectors of the internet up for mob rule. But since it’s open format doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, how do we cope? What kind of “good rules” can we create to ensure access to quality information? Yes, a more direct democracy is ideal, but that’s not going to happen unless the US fragments and our governments shrink dramatically – we don’t have the infrastructure, political or logistical, to implement direct democracy on the scale of the US government as it is now. It seems to me that enforcing “good rules” on wikipedia would fall into the hands of the “Wikipedians” that currently exercise added authority in edits and revisions. There have been many complaints directed at the Wikipedians, who seem to have their own various agendas. Centralizing intellectual authority has historically been used as a means of propaganda – just open any encyclopedia and you can deconstruct it based on its funders, the backgrounds of its authors, etc.
And is the knowledge we are seeking to document on Wikipedia objective? Using your example of psychonautics: people have extremely varied experiences using drugs, and some get different things out of it than others. While I agree with you that the Wikipedia entries on psychonautics don’t do the drugs or the users justice, who is to say what a legitimate account is?
May 3rd, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Не уделите мне минутку?…
Roman Imperial Coinage (RIC) It’s key focuses include tracking the activities of PR firms that specialize in manipulating […….
May 18th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
как мило.))…
преподаватель Journalists are now utilizing web 2.0 technology as a means of collaborating with other journalists…