Reminiscences... (6)

(29/08/10)
This weeks lecture concerned the nature of Information Technology and its impact on journalism. Three 'versions' of the internet were described.

Web 1.0
This was the internet in its infancy. It was chiefly an extension of the "industrial paradigm" medias such as TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines, etc. Advertisers utilising such websites tended to treat it as a wall for placing posters, hence the term 'Brochure Ware'. Little interaction was encouraged at this point.

Web 2.0
This was the era of "Prod-users" (Brunz, QUT 2005). Online media stopped having hierarchical publishing practices and instead used more user generated content. This was the birth of such sites as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc. Media became much more available to the common person in that anyone could produce and broadcast their own content. This had two effects. Firstly, the agenda for public debate widened considerably with forums such as 4chan and flickr bypassing commercial media (and often good taste as well). Secondly, it inundated the internet with poorly written/produced material as authors with little or no credibility/talent could gain an audience. Memes, spam, and other virulent media started to flourish.

Web 3.0
This is an era which was predicted to occur in some point in the future, and would probably have happened  had the dead not started walking and eating the living. Called "The Semantic Web" it was essentially pinpoint marketing by accumulating information about an individuals habits (online and in the physical world through GPS on smart phones) and utilising it so as to successfully diagnose what products that person might buy. Amazon suggestive selling was described as a precursor to this next model. A possible downside to this model was described as hyper localisation. As peoples habits were forecasted to be recorded and manipulated in order to better serve their interests, it was predicted that possibly this could make people unaware of anything other than their own narrow interests, something which quite likely runs against the grain of investigative journalism which seeks to educate about a wide variety of subjects.

Journalism was described as being particularly threatened by the internet because of problems of entitlement. As the internet had been providing web news articles for free, it was presumed that this would choke out physical forms of printed news, and would be incredibly difficult to start charging subscriptions for. It was perceived that people would not be enthusiastic about being charged for what they used to get for free. And if you could do this, how would you avoid readers from taking their attention elsewhere? Simply grafting on the old concept of subscriptions onto a new form of web media is probably not a viable option, because there would be a competitor that would under cut any such attempt. The question therefore raised was, how to make readers pay for the online news? Investigative Journalism was not cheap, required a lot a skill, training, and therefore capital. Financial upkeep was noted as an absolute necessity to keep this profession a profession. The difficulty lay in how to fund it in the era of free online media.