Once upon a time, news trickled out into newspapers or magazines. Then radio brought news bulletins out on a twice or three-times daily schedule. Television merged the fast pace of radio with the graphic content of photographs but didn’t really accelerate things further. Over many years we doubled or tripled our daily dose, but that was about it.
Until cable. With the advent of CNN and Headline News, and all their successors we now had news on an hourly basis. Naturally the Internet would only take that further, with news now literally “on demand.”
So it was only a matter of time until some clever news agency merged various technologies to give us this: a fully embedded, Google map-based, interactive display of currently known hash houses in Florida:
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/php/specialreports/index.php?report_id=791046
Can a full merge of all this with Google Earth be far behind? Will we soon have “breaking news” layers for Google Earth allowing us to zoom in as events unfold? Will Google eventually stream live satellite coverage to allow us to watch police chases and shootouts in real time?
Is there even any downside? (Well apart from the unfortunate inevitability that some poor sap will have his house displayed for national scorn due to a mistyped address…)
Pretty soon will this scenario be not clever fantasy but simply the way it is?
If so, is that good or bad?
Discuss!
The 12 Angry Men Blog 
December 13, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Sorry I dont understand. Can you explain about your post. Short and simple
December 13, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Essentially, we pay news people to decide what to report. There is so much information, we need someone, or many people, to filter it for us. Often we know the biases or predilections of those reporting (who among us doesn’t react when we hear the name “Geraldo”), sometimes we do not. If the future posited comes to pass, we will be doing that for ourselves, for good or ill.
I’m not sure I want to spend the needed capital (in time, if not in money) required to do as good a job as, say, Ted Koppel (nor am I sure I can), and I kind of fear the result if my best is a Simon Cowell substitute. Under the current system, some opposing views get through each day. If we get to set all the filters on our own, few of us, I fear, will elect to expose themselves to other points of view . . . or maybe any point of view at all.
December 14, 2007 at 9:57 am
DD3 wrote:
###I’m not sure I want to spend the needed capital (in time, if not in money) required to do as good a job as, say, Ted Koppel (nor am I sure I can), and I kind of fear the result if my best is a Simon Cowell substitute.###
Exactly, though I’ll go one further: At least in the service sector, money IS time. It’s a stand-in for an exchange of my time for someone else’s time, because each person’s time is worth more or less depending on the situation.
Everyone being their own journalist strikes me as essentially as non-productive as a lot of the “direct democracy” schemes it is essentially a variant of.
I see this through the economist’s notion of comparative advantage. Professionals most definitely bring risks with them so the blogosphere of amateur journalists has an important and salutary effect of keeping the professionals more honest (cf. Dan Rather), but think of the huge waste of time if everyone’s being a journalist… gathering, filtering, etc., and totally against comparative advantage.
I can’t recall where I saw this but I read some comments once about “the paperless office.” If all we had was the paperless office, one of the most important inventions we could have would be paper!
MPA