Stop | Arlington, Virginia

Quoted in the Economist from 2006, Joe Kraus of JotSpot, (link via David Sanger):

What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed. “The old media model was: there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out.”

I would argue that we have always been working to figure out how to integrate the new with the old; in fact, this division between “old” and “new” media is an ultimately meaningless debate. The question isn’t about either/or, but both; Ethan Bauley:

It changes the game when you have a deep perspective on the pros and cons of both angles [of any issue]. … the simple fact is that there is a wide market of information out there these days. In the same way that risk is inexorable from reward, veracity and depth are strongly negatively correlated to speed.

As my friend Bryan Payne puts it,

Not everything is zero sum – it’s not black and white – it’s not us versus them. We have to stop thinking that way. We place such limited left and right limits on ourselves; it’s as if our society goes through life with blinders on; we limit ourselves from seeing 80% of reality out there. Look – new media/old media – whatever. Why don’t we toss out those labels and recognize that they are both just tools to communicate information. … In the end it’s a good thing to have a wide array of tools and hopefully in the longer run the ones that work best for accomplishing certain things are the ones that are most widely adopted; until a newer, better, more innovative tool comes around and the whole cycle repeats.

We need bridges instead of fences; the real future economic returns will come from integrating various forms of media rather than staking one’s name and/or economic livelihood on one side of the fence.