langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2011-07-12

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Dienstag, 12. Juli 2011

"It’s interesting that so much online publishing is moving into a small handful of massive, closed, proprietary networks after being so distributed and diverse during the big boom of blogs and RSS almost a decade ago."

2011-07-12-recentral

slauti 4671 days AGO
i find it astonishing that bloggers and commenters do not reflect further on this and do not dig below the surface.
Factual news gathering, processing and distribution is for and will stay with the professionals. obviously it has to be financed and payed for. only companies with revenue through indirect business model can do this and are in fact forced to do it.

on the other hand online publishing does not - as that remark might suggest - move into the hand of massive closed networks, unless you count facebook as such. it is as diverse as ever since electronic distribution costs started to fall and actually scale smoothely from nothing to virtually limitless. this publishings do fill a more important function of media which is commenting on "the world".

it is just so that these millions of overlapping micro publishing fields have a heard time to constitute a recognizable and navigable public space. our recognition would leave all but our own micro bubbles invisible and part of the ground instead of "seeing" the figure of a unified public space in the way of the forum romanum. that figure is something that mass media created and that always seemed to be more than it really was. that is, what we think.

chris 4671 days AGO
The snippet I quoted obscures the fact that Marco is talking about _personal publishing_ first and foremost; to view and interpret it from the perspective of more general "online publishing" is rather interesting.

Question 1.a: Has online personal publishing really been "moving into/onto" proprietary networks at a grand scale (where there are many shades of "moving into/onto", from outright replacement to complementation)?

Semi-related question 1.a.1: Does exposure to Facebook increase or decrease the likelihood of people using "old-school" personal publishing mechanisms (i.e. blogs)? 1.a.2: Vice versa?

Question 1.b: Has online publishing in general been moving into/onto said networks?

Question 2: Do proprietary, centralizing networks/"publishing platforms" receive an outsized amount of attention relative to the rest of the cosmos of overlapping micro (and not-so-micro) publishing fields (OMPFs; I really like the term), considering their "actual importance" (however we would go about measuring that)?

[Mulling over those issues shall continue ...]

slauti 4670 days AGO
yeah it will, and for sure too.
just one more thing: in a way and even if capitalism will evolve into something else and more wholesome in the next 20 years something like the internet infrastructure needs to be maintained by large and well coordinated formations of people. Many of these will try to control every aspect of its usage. that is the way of business, religion and politics. but it does not mean that this control is possible. so while we maintain that it is good to maintain as many near parts of the infrastructure ourselves it is not alway possible. and what facebook really does in its core, is not making Suckerberg rich and put him in control but stressing peer pressure on peer uniformity. that is something any decent civil individual like me must be sceptical about.

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