News Corp. Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch set the Internet abuzz Monday after an interview appeared online in which he said the company is considering blocking Google from being able to search its Web sites. “I think we’ve been asleep” is what he said. Echoing accusations of “parasitism” and “kleptomania” that other News Corp. execs have levied against Google for featuring their content on Google sites, Mr. Murdoch said search companies “steal our stories”.
Well, I guess I’ll quit quoting him now before I get sued… this article has been posted on Wall Street Journal for free, yet…
My reaction is that of formal logic. Here’s what the old and conventional establishment Murdoch overlooked.
1.) Digitalization of information
- Premise 1: digital media is more efficient (from the world of atoms to the world of bits) → (true)
- Premise 2: news=information. information (i.e news) is/has been/can be digitalized ≡ a fact → (true)
- Premise 3: digitalized information is easier to: a.) store, b.) distribute, c.) produce, d.) reproduce → (true)
∩ Argument: digital media is factually more efficient! → logically valid and all premises are true.
Murdoch seems to agree with this, so far so good.
2.) Democratization of information
- Premise 4: production of information (i.e. Twitter, YouTube, the Net) is democratized, and is more efficient (i.e. individuals, PC, mobile phones, versus typemachines, pencils, paper, journalists in hotels etc.) ≡ (true)
- Premise 5: distribution of information is democratized, and is more efficient (i.e. geographic distances are irrelevant, time between production, transport en distribution closes to/is miliseconds, wordwide ≡ (true)
∩ Argument: democratized digital information distribution & production is more cost-effective then conventional → logically valid and all premises are true.
Thus, by inference:
→→ Logical deduction: If digital information is factually more cost-efficient (which is true), and its production & distribution is democratized (which is true), then it is logical to say that digital media IS econimically more efficient and cost-effective!
∑→ Logical conclusion: If it is so that the feasibility of an economic model demands superior efficiency and cost-effectiveness over its rivals (as dictates the ‘economic theory’), then it is logical to conclude that, in the long term, the business model of the digital media will be superior of that of the conventional media.
It is, therefore, only logical that Murdoch and Co. will lose. Right?! It’s formal logic.
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I would love to see Newscorp’s Unspeak filtered out from my Google searches! Perhaps having his propaganda up against more newsworthy accounts shows too much contrast for his liking. Heh.
Your argument looks sound but I would like to see you address the question of quality. I use wikipedia regularly but only on topics where I have enough experience to do a sanity check. If I get a tweet that Jeff Golblum has been killed in an accident I will check with abc.net.au, If I am checking a medical malaria medication advice I will stick to somewhere like who.org.
How do we maintain the quality of information over time?
Thanks for your comment AllyOops, great question, glad you asked that! I do find this subject intriguiging the extent that I’ll take time to elaborate accordingly…
How do we maintain the quality of information over time?!
Well, I think you’ve actually answered your own question by providing your own ‘sanity check’. The quality will be maintained just the same way as it happened before, it won’t. But you, as an individual, can!
How exactly?
With the democratization of production factors of news, this process of determining the quality has shifted/is shifting from the editorial ivory towers of cenventional media corporation to the ‘consumer’ of this news. This consumer, in order to determine the authenticity, is now forced to act proactively when determining the quality of that news. (That is why you tend to go to who.org for medical advice). This makes us, (people who use digital media AND perform ‘sanity checks’ themselves), something like ‘pro-sumers’ instead of consumers. We should set our own quality filter!
That is the big difference.
Why?
We all should get acustomed to doing this ‘sanity check’ you refer to, as often as possible, only the difference is that in the past we haven’t been doing that with the conventional sources. We assumed that if an ‘authority’ comes with some news than it must be true. They had a monopoly on news. Now they don’t anymore because some student from Iran can Tweet what is going on, depicting he events probably better than some journalist that has been kept at the border and is trying to validate the rumors. In this case the quality is the factual news on factual events (real-time!), not some sophisticated linguistic elaboration upon it written in dactylic hexameter, or something like that. The same holds for something like Michael Jackson memorial. I mean how many reporters do we actually need at the Michael Jackson memorial? 160, 170, and all reporting the same event?! And probably all staying in hotels, vans, or whatever, with all the equipment, the transportation costs, distribution etc. When you buy say the Herald Sun, you’re actually paying for the costs made by their journalists being there (if any) and reporting on te same event like the 170 others doing the same thing… (if they weren’t then you’re paying for those who were but have sold their news to Herald Sun). Well, I’m not willing to pay for that For me, tweets from say 36 different attendants with some pics would suffice in this case. There is no quality issue here.
Filtering & Selection
As is the case with all the news reporting; it is always subject to interpretation and selections based on geo-social and semantic relevance, ‘juicyness’ and probably also political orientation of it’s reporters and audience. It’s just how information transmission and processing works amongst humans. For this matter people have completely trusted the conventional media in this, and perhaps rightly so to some extent, so that we don’t have to do it ourselves. But the fact of the matter is that most of these large media companies have their own opportunistic interests in providing this news. The ‘filter’ they apply is still ‘their’ filter for whatever purposes. And since we don’t have time to recheck everything, they’ll still have their jobs, they just need to adapt their business models.
So if we really want to maintain the quality over time, we’ll have to accept the following facts: that a.) there is more information, b.) everyone can make it ( = more ‘noise’), c.) the conventional media have their filters d.) we, as prosumers, have our own different interests, interpretations etc. and thus different filters.
The maintenance of quality of information eventually happens on an individual level, but is distilled through several filters in coming to us. In the past the only filters were the Murdocks of this world, now we’ll have to proactively engage in retrieving the truth ourselves. And since we don’t have time for this we’ll have to rely on some ‘quality’ sources. But what this quality is, is thus dependant on our own set of preferences within our socio-demographic environment.
So there is no quality issue here. There are experts (like doctors, or pilots) whose judgement you can trust, but not say on environmental issues. For the same reason, there are amateur bloggers whose judgement you can’t trust when it comes to medicine, but who can be just as trustworthy as journalists when they’re sending realtime pics from conflicts at hand. In the past we trusted these judgements on professional journalists and news corporations, now they’re just one source of information and we’ll have to set our own ‘sanity checks’.
Surely, for in-depth discussion you’ll probably have to buy the Herald, but not for Michael Jackson memorial.