Changing relationships between producer and audience

"We're currently seeing a reshuffling of who owns information."

Consider where we used to get information -- the newspaper. We first discussed the New York Times. As of 11:30 a.m. today, the "top of the fold" has three articles on the economy crisis, one of the Tampa Bay Rays' striking success, and one of cyber justice.

Who decides what information is privileged for display? For the traditional, and even the e-storefront of the established newspaper, it's the editorial board.

And how does a person make it to an editorial board?

"It's this club that you end up joining, with like-minded interests, political views... it's this central authority."

Compare the traditional news source, like a newspaper, to a new media source, such as a blog or e-zine. The blog allows what used to be the most passive of audience members to become the editors, deciding what information is relevant and important and where to display it. Weinberger goes so far as to suggest this transitional movement is making everyone an editor.

What this really means for us, if we're to go back to the NYT, is that the old model is designed to tell us what we should be thinking about. The new model of information delivery seems to force us to make that decision for ourselves.

Should everyone be an editor? This question becomes a key focus of the discussion. In what ways do we as a community benefit from a very advanced ability to control our news sources/news/information? What do we lose when we move away from centralized media sources?

The old model provides the audience with editors, whose job is "protecting us from what isn't worth our time, and giving us what our beliefs need for a sturdy foundation."

Page 132 - "but with the misc. [the Internet] it's all available to us unfiltered."

This statement is basely ludicrous. The Internet as a specific example requires people to create the information resources. Acknowledgment of the existence of epistemology clearly requires acknowledgment of the filter the person becomes to the Internet.

His point has shades of truth and illumination. Weinberger illustrates the movement toward simply massive amounts of variety in information. The idea of variety informs the descriptor "unfiltered." Further, we have the choice in what information sources we use, which gives us the ability to customize our A1, essentially.

To what extent are media sources active or passive? What potential is offered for active/passive interaction is present in these different sources?