February 20, 2005
CNN's In the Money debates blogs
I caught snippets of two CNN shows discussing the blogosphere today.
I just watched a segment on CNN's In the Money where they were debating the power of blogs and how the mainstream media needed to take blogging into account when reporting the news. The discussion was interesting because Howard Kurtz from Reliable Sources described how big media now had to adapt to the nature of blogs and that this is a turning point for television news much like the change newspapers had to face when television news began to dominate.
The only comment I have about the exchange is to note that one of the In the Money co-hosts Susan Lisovicz seemed to ask whether or not there should be some form of regulation for bloggers and what they had to say because there have been cases where stories have started and spread on the blogosphere and then turned out not to be true. I applaud Kurtz' response because he noted that big media, despite all of its controls, had also had its share of high-profile blunders recently. The difference is that in the blogosphere, such mistakes are exposed within a couple of days or even hours but with major media outlets, retractions have sometimes taken weeks (e.g. the Dan Rather debacle this past fall).
The debate is one that has fired up again after the White House journalist Jeff Gannon had some unseemly photos posted on a blog and Eason Jordan resigned from CNN (Newsday.com Story). I am not going to get into the specifics on that case because this is not a political or journalism blog, but one of the remarks made on CNN's Reliable Sources in relation to blogging itself is of interest:
[some say that]...the blogosphere as a self- correcting perfect democracy where the participants supply accountability and oversight. The other side of that coin is to say that the mob is headless.
See http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0502/20/rs.01.html for the full transcript of this conversation.
If we begin to look at blogs as an alternate form of communication in the academic space, how do we reconcile this with the lack of oversight that comes from the publishing in academic journals? Is it enough to say that the blogosphere will cleanse itself (as in an OSOSS? I know this gets into epistemological and even ontological issues around the debate but I am concerned with more pragmatic concerns. Even in the two weeks I found people posting ideas that they think are truly breaking new ground in the field of instructional design and e-learning but they were really only spouting things that have been said for years. In some of these posts there was near-plagiarism (meaning that I believe the person was doing this intentionally) and in other cases it was clear that the lack of attribution were more related to ignorance.
In academia, are blogs a replacement for traditional publishing? An addendum? Do they merely fill the space between private communication (e.g. email) and public research dissemination? Is the critical mass in academia in place to self-regulate?
I generally look to history when people say, "X, Y, or, Z way of doing things is dead." To say that academic publishing as we know it is dead is as premature as saying computers will result in a paperless office. Maybe, one day, but the file cabinets in my cube would say that day is still far in the future. In the meantime, I expect that we will begin to see some interesting blends that continue to force us to confront the flow of information in new ways.
Posted by Rovy at February 20, 2005 3:34 PM