Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good

"Whose News? Media, Technology and the Common Good" is a conference going on right now (March 3-5) at Harvard, and there is loads of really interesting stuff being said (lots of video clips available), as well as links to interesting content, made accessible through morph, the Media Center of the American Press Institute's blog. Journalists and bloggers are participating and the bloggers are commenting on their blogs, here, here, here, here and here, providing a fascinating commentary on the formal events.

I've said this before--maybe not here, but whenever I do presentations--the best way to get a grip on the trends that will be/are rocking our world is to pay attention to what's happening and being said in the media arenas. Music and news are two I think are particularly apropros. You don't have to be an Arthur C. Clarke to make some leaps from the predictions about journalism or music consumption to the future of the relationship between libraries and their communities of users.

And here's part of the road map. The aforementioned Media Center has a "Thinking Paper" available called We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of Media and Information that I would say is a "must read". From the introduction:
"There are three ways to look at how society is informed.The first is that people are gullible and will read, listen to, or watch just about anything. The second is that most people require an informed intermediary to tell them what is good, important or meaningful. The third is that people are pretty smart; given the means, they can sort things out for themselves, find their own version of the truth. The means have arrived. The truth is out there."

Librarians, journalists, DJs, film makers...we're all "informed intermediaries" and our professional worlds are all being impacted by the arrival of the third way of society informing itself. None of us own "the means" anymore.

Thanks to Rafat at paidcontent.org for the original link.