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So last Saturday Jeff Jarvis wrote a post that I only just found today. He discusses the Pew Research Center’s study on Americans’ views of their news media.
He discusses the unsurprising and not particularly interesting realization that, shocker, the public is less and less trustworthy of the media. The first graphic that Jeff uses, highlights “Persistent Criticisms of the Press” He goes on to discuss the MSM and the reasons that they are losing the trust of the public and the divide being drawn between the educated and younger media consumers who are going online, and older consumers who are stuck in the world of television and USA Today.
Unfortunately, if you take a closer look at the graphic, you may see what I see. What I see is that across the board, yes all the numbers indicating positive views of the Press are much lower than they were in 1985, but, except for “Protect Democracy,” they’re also 7, 4, 5, and 17 points better than they were in 2002, marking an upward trend over the last 5 years, aka, more than 20% of the time period in question, so I would ask, what is it that has marked this great change in criticisms?
The first and easiest observation to make is that this upward trend coincides with the normalization of blogs on the internet, both blog writing and reading, which really became common in 2002. I would say that this could be a negative trend, as displayed in the large number of comments to Jeff’s post. Why is this negative? Well, unfortunately, rather than contributing to an enlightening, group-educating discussion, they split on right and left dogma and became the general flame-fest of many blog comment sections.
I worry that blogs, particularly left and right blogs like DailyKOS / Talking Points Memo and Little Green Footballs / MichelleMalkin.com /etc contribute to the sectarianization and tribalization of society, and not in a good way ! Not in a healthy, “everyone has their own likes and dislikes and niches” sort of way. But instead in a breakdown of the social fabric and increase in the overall fragmentation of civilization.
So please, let’s try to make blogs good for crowd-educating as well as crowd-sourcing and crowd-entertaining. It’s for the good of ourselves and our children!
One last note, Jeff expresses ongoing shock at the popularity of the local news… Maybe I’m the only one in the citizen media / networked journalism segment of the blogosphere who comes from a working-class non-intellectual family, but I understand this perfectly. The local news watching segment corresponds with the older segment of news consumers. These are folks who still believe in local community and having ties to their town and neighbors. Sure the “upwardly mobile and attractive” anchors and reporters are not necessarily loyal to the given community, but people like to feel that they are connected, that they understand each other.
That’s why social networking sites are exploding with the fragmented over-worked young professionals, and local television is still strong with the older folks. Let’s be honest, what is really good about MySpace or Facebook or, gasp, even e-mail? Sure they help you stay in touch with your friends and be connected with your family that are far away, but ask yourselves, why don’t you just see your friends in the real world, and no I’m not talking about Second Life.
There is a great opportunity for us to use networked journalism and the benefits of RSS and other new Web 2.0 technologies to greatly increase community and de-fragment our society and civilization beforer its too late. But we have to make the choice and we have to act. Otherwise Web 2.0 will just be fun and interesting for the intellectuals and the hipsters, and the privileged.
That’s not what I want, nor do I want the shitty Local News that’s too focused on crime and weather to continue to be the only option.
I hope you don’t either.
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Small World News began developing a pilot for a new show this past weekend. I can’t go into any of the details yet. But to create the show we had to finally break down and buy some software for screencasting. (There has to be a better name for this technology/idea then this right?) Our primary editing machine is our fancy MacBook Pro (Thanks Vloggies 2006!) so staying in the OS X software pool was a requirement, although Captive did make me drool when I stumbled across it.
About 6 months ago Snapz Pro X was the popular program among all the cool kids. Maybe it’s the stinginess my father instilled in me, or maybe I just was trying to avoid the actual task at hand. But when I saw it would cost $70 dollars for Snapz Pro X (it’s only $30 to take still images, but we need video capabilities) I couldn’t help but think there has to be a cheaper way to do this.
Using the amazingly intuitive keywords “OS X Screencast Software” I found a thread on 37 signals from last year. There was a lot of talk about Snapz Pro and a couple of other key players. But the early link to IShowU from the folks at ShinyWhiteBox was everything I wanted and it only costs $20.
No, it doesn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles that Snapz Pro has, like creating trails or any other visual effects. The biggest feature it has though is being able to encode directly into a native DV format. This allows to be able to inter-cut captured clips inside of Final Cut Pro without anymore encoding beyond the initial recording.
The interface is really simple and highly customizable, without any of the annoying over sized buttons and or hidden complex options that plague a lot of software for the mac. So if you’re looking for a cheap alternative to SnapzPro look no further then IShowU, display capturing pure and simple.
So I’m an inconsistent and unreliable blogger, unlike my friend Jeff Jarvis and many other blog-tastic bloggers out there. But I’m trying to get better.
A few days ago NewTeevee blogged about this interesting study commissioned by Akamai. It found that one of the biggest headaches for viewers of video on the web are the inexorable waiting times for buffering and adequate playback of video.
Isn’t this something we learned by the end of the 90s? Does anyone really like watching awful Windows Media and Realplayer streaming video? Perhaps this is part of the reason Big Media is having so much trouble getting a leg up in the new video world.
That, or maybe we’re too focused on “Videoblogging” and not enough on production and distribution. The name is not the thing, the thing is the thing. Are all people who utilize RSS, WordPress, etc to distribute video on the web necessarily Videobloggers? Particularly if Videoblogging comes to mean a specific genre of content being produced and distributed on the web? For example, what, exactly, is the difference between a Magazine, a Newspaper, and a Periodical?
Produce interesting, innovative, and professional content on the web. That will change the world of web video and bring a larger audience probably more than making the video less painful to view!
In fact, despite the predominance of YouTube in the mainstream discourse concerning Video on the Net, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that approximately 60% of adults watch video online, and 62% preferred videos with “professional quality.”
Now then, this is an important realization for independent video producers, and one that is necessary if we truly want to revolutionize the face of modern media and make a living producing content ourselves. Video cameras and other devices that record video are becoming nearly ubiquitous in Western society, particularly the urban United States.
However, recording quality is not. Despite the ease and affordability of things like the Pure Digital FlipVideo camera, or Sanyo’s Xacti series, or many others, without having quality audio, thinking about whether you have adequate light, and most importantly, how to be sure your video tells an interesting story, you’ll be up a creek. And in terms of the new Sanyo Xacti’s cost, we can outfit two of our correspondents with cameras, mics, and some tapes for the same.
Luckily, for similar prices or less you can purchase miniDV camcorders on Ebay with mic inputs and possibly even find a mic included in prices similar to these new mpeg4 cameras!
All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t sacrifice quality for accessibility or hip gadgetry, and it now seems that our audience agrees.
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