But I’ve since switched beats, so the stuff on social networks you see in The Economist now is by my successor, Martin Giles.

A year or so ago, the Economist, in one of its leaders – and I wonder if it was you who wrote it, called on social-networking sites to build more open platforms and to, essentially, begin “talking to each other”. Today, as I see, it is beginning to happen. Facebook, Twitter and AIM allow users to export and import status messages – but they would do well to quickly allow more such content exchange like photos, links, friends etc.

Seems to me you’re just very excited about being able to create your own news aggregator. Put up a paywall on most news that traditional media are pumping out at their expense and you’ll be left with a lot of babbling from social networks and little information, biased material from think tanks and some serious but highly specialized information coming from the academic field.

The fact that you refer to an article that is behind the Economist paywall is, in the context of your article, rather ironic.

I work in the online media industry, and there are times when I look back and think 10 yrs ago, this industry didn’t even exist!

BTW, a few words on Facebook vs twitter: let me say that I use Facebook news feed much more frequently than blogs, and twitter the least. I find twitter very “limiting”. Facebook news feed for me has multiple options of links, videos, images and comments, while Twitter forces me to limit to 120 characters. There are some thoughts which require longer sentences + images to express. I find Facebook to be a much more evolved online tool than twitter.

Re Twitter, specifically, though: I’m feeling more and more tempted to try it, but I confess (as a journalist who wrote about it long before it was popular) that I never quite “got” what it could do for me. I am afraid that the time cost/benefit calculation would turn negative (= “time suck”)

So, for now, I am still resisting getting my account. But the resistance is getting weaker….

Re the old/new, though: I would argue that you are entirely in the “new” world: After all, how are you making me aware of your film? On my blog, with conversation “among” the audience. Just what I meant.

http://satansez.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/are-you-a-cyborg

If you’ll excuse the buzzwords – your network on Twitter can be a personalized crowdsourced reading collective.

For example apropos your thread on Dawkins – here’s a tweet about a science journalism blog that I’d likely never otherwise have discovered

“Dawkins The Selfish Gene could equally have been called The Cooperative Gene without changing a word of the book http://bit.ly/1XDK3I”

As in real life, with real friends, the trick is choosing carefully who you devote your (ever finite) time to.

View:
http://www.TheMythofTimeTheMovie.com

I just read her description of your blog, and Hannibal, which was interesting because my dad is from Tunisia, where Carthage is. If you ever have a chance to check out Tunisia, do so. The food is great!

Merçi beaucoup and I will keep reading for sure!

I’m writing an amateur food blog, so a perfect example to me, is someone using an iPhone to find and capture photos at a farmers’ market, then posting images/video of your fantastic finds online or spreading the word about a great vendor on Twitter/Facebook/a blog. Small and pertinent chunklets of information are dispersing through the internet so that people can connect anywhere. In many ways the world expands, and in others, we look for it to contract.

This easy accessibility to information astounds me on a daily basis, and I also believe that it’s possible for online friends to “get” you better than in-person friends, as that has become a part of my life too. The people in physical proximity can love you for who you are, and the people online can love what you know and are happy to share. Sometimes you are lucky when a person does both.

I agree that we are definitely in a coming-of-age and can’t wait to see what happens next. This was a very well-written article, thank you!

A friend of mine, Pip Coburn, calls the generational categories you describe:
- digital natives
- digital immigrants, and
- analogs.

I have nothing to say in disagreement. But I might add a spash of perspective:

1) Always remember that I AM A PRINT JOURNALIST TOO! I’m emotionally close to your father. By nature, I am a cloyingly, nauseatingly nostalgic type.

2) I counterbalance that with my left brain and history. Example: Your father and I might be said to be the equivalent of monks in 1455. yes, indeed. Monks (ie, monasteries) were the “fedora-hat-wearing” old media at the time gutenberg invented his printing press. They were hand-copying (hence “manu-script”) the books in existence. The printing press distrupted them, and their romance, and their way of life, and getting sloshed in the brewery downstairs after hours. The monks, I hardly need to point out, fought the “new media” for the subsequent century and more. But the new media did not go away. Latin (the monks’ language) declined in importance, vernacular rose. Society changed for the worse and the better. but the monks were left out of it because… they refused to see that society didn’t give a darn about them.

I really enjoyed reading your comment filled with examples to help me understand your points.

As a former journalism instructor, I would suggest that you continue to wear your fedora (invisibly of course), for those with wonder and passion and awe, combined with You Tube and RSS feeds and iTunes Libraries, will enjoy a stimulating, satisfying and romantic life–provided they are not accessing this new information during inappropriate times such as driving or love-making.

As far as James Baldwin’s quotation about writing what you know and then deconstructing it, I would add that you can also write well about what you don’t know, providing you do the research.

Enjoyed the post and generally agree with it. As a student, I am learning and participating in the media revolution every day.

Although it is a roarin’ time!, I have had the opportunity to see first hand the dumpy side of it.

I am the son and grandson of print journalists. My father is a romatic and sees this revolution as the end of an era and, for him, a way of life. Growing up around the news room I can see exactly what he means.
I still remember the first cell phone he was issued and the first toshiba satellite he lugged home. He is one of the last in his corps to arrive at press conferences with a legal pad. He might disown me if he found out I just started blogging.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that he’s incurably bitter. He decides to take on a sardonic attitude for the sake of irony because he has known the direction that his industry has been headed for a while. But, he is alarmed at how rapidly it has shrunk and how many colleagues he has seen laid off.

I hate to admit it, but your point that the ‘crisis’ has nothing to do with 99% of the population came as a revelation to me. I can’t help that I have descended from a line of journalists and writers. I can’t help it that I am an aspiring one. Naturally, I am in crisis mode. How do you remain so calm?!

I suppose this chapter of history is still not closed and who knows how much longer print journalism will be here on a large scale. As a history student I see a great story. I have lived it after all. When you can remember the dank smells of a capital bureau I’d say you’ve lived it!

But, I would say that peer content editors are infinitely more stimulating and relevent. I wish I started blogging 4 years ago. Youtube and the like have made media more interactive and informative. NPR is more interactive thanks to its website. Yeah, things have changed for the better for us consumers.

There should be something to be said about that romantic journalism that wears a fedora. Its a story about those that made the news a story. The new journalist isn’t any different though. As James Baldwin once reminded us, writers only need to write from our own experiences and then preform an examination on them. With the new tools we have and Baldwin’s simple rule, the possibilities are endless.

But, as you said, that is not unique to the “new” media. TV sets were deadly for creativity, the imagination, family and sex lives.

The new gadgets are above all dangerous (in traffic) and barbarous.

But: All this is a matter of some people being uncivilized, not about their media being inherently flawed. We’re all still learning the etiquette of this new world. I’m just starting, slowly, to get the hang of it.

Televisions did that – turned most of our population into couch potatoes!

Although I am guilty of my addiction to our New Renaissance, I’ve recently blogged a rant about it, please feel free to drop by and peruse my latest mishap involving Texting!

http://satansez.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/to-text-or-not-to-text-communication-overload-part-1

Thank you for your informed update (don’t cha just wish we would have bought more APPLE stock in 2006?) & I do love your term – ‘New Renaissance’!!!