The Networking Net is Working.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading what Jeff Jarvis had to say! This article was refreshing with its diagrams, but also made a ton of sense and got me thinking about new perspectives of today’s media “filtration system”, if you will. I have been examining media, literacy, blogging, and a variety of modern technological changes throughout this course, but I never stopped to think about one of the main similarities between blogging and modern times in general. In my posts about blogging, I wrote about how blogging holds the author accountable more than books or other writing ever has. This is due to the fact that people can comment on blogs, and everyone has easy access to reading what they want to read and voicing their opinions as broadly as they would like. But, this is a similar phenomenon to what Jarvis explains through his graphs, because news sources are held to a new level of accountability, too!

This may sound like a juvenile, surface of an observation, but I never consciously registered that the emphasis of writing now has transitioned. The critical part of news used to be finding ways to market opinions and the networking process of getting a piece out into the open to be read, critiqued, and inspiring fans to look for more works. Now, though, the important part is actually what is being written, because once it is online or discussed online it is not going anywhere. If someone makes a formal statement, it could travel just as fast as a brief controversial remark. This places all of the responsibility on public relations and saving face, so the reader and the distribution forces have all the power. I was not confused by Jarvis’ models, but it really got me thinking about how networking has changed and how much more we communicate with strangers over topics we share an interest in and how much easier it is to follow a specific news source for better or worse.