The answers my friends- are blowin’in the wind….

Much hype has surrounded the degradation of the online world and the proliferation of crap that is clogging the electronic galaxy, but no one has stopped to ask the question, how is this different than the physical world?  Has anyone actually counted how many truly awful songs and novels there have been since time begun?  Granted, the web enables users to create crappy content much more quickly and easily and distasteful items to circulate much more widely, but I would argue that the content online is no worse then what happens in our everyday lives.  In fact, it is a reflection of it, a mirror image of the inner thoughts and desires that humans keep pent up during polite conversation and that is why so many people are so critical of the web, they do not want to face the animal lurking inside them.

Glaser’s statement that “the horrors of the online world are just the horrors of the offline world in another format” supports this point.  He goes on further to say that “the freedom of expression online has opened up global distribution for every human thought or deed, good or bad,” unfortunately it is often the bad that gets the most attention. 

This new instant-access world where anything seems to go has created a very difficult situation for print journalists.  They are faced with some pretty stark questions such as, how does my work fit into this new order, how do I compete in a world of would-be journalists not constrained by “journalistic integrity” and free to show as many beheadings as their bandwidth permits, and for many the answers have not been encouraging…

Glaser raises a great point when he asks, “when rumors run rampant on gossip sites, do newspaper sites and wire services report that? If videos of beheadings are some of the most popular content online — or represent the most searched-for sites — does that mean that broadcasters need to consider showing them to their audiences?”  These are very compelling questions indeed, Nielsen ratings decide what shows stay on the air, text messaged votes decide who gets booted off American Idol, why shouldn’t page hits determine what makes the news?  Why not replace those old talking heads (no pun intended) with what the public actually wants to see?  The inherent bias in the news would be replaced with a particular audiences’ likes and dislikes and just like today, different segments of people would be drawn to different channels based on content.

Our culture and journalism in particular, is possessed with an air of seriousness that does not mirror reality.  As McBride says in the Glaser article, “We are sicker than we thought.”  I agree and I say lets just embrace our dark sides, stop sweeping them under the rug and then perhaps the internet won’t be so full of subversion and the news won’t be so out of touch.  People won’t have to hide anymore.  Much like children in Europe don’t run around drunk everyday even though there is no drinking age, putting control of content into the hands of the viewer might actually improve the content…  Particularly as the novelty wears off I think you will find less and less of the sensationalist stuff and more and more serious news.

 Wikipedia works doesn’t it?  Why can’t the same thing happen with the news or online news sites?  And if there happened to be a channel full of disgusting content, viewers who had other tastes could ignore it in favor of different sites, ones dominated by people with less “vulgar” tastes, that is the votes of the “vanilla” people would drown out the votes of the dissenting weirdoes.

Ward says that “the ethic of “just show everything” is no ethic at all. It is an abandonment of ethics. It is a trendy-sounding ethic that conveniently excuses the journalist (and news organization) from the difficult ethical decisions in deciding what to publish.”  I completely disagree with his point, plus Ward probably falls into the category I mentioned earlier i.e. that of suppressed inner animal.  The ethics of let the people decide what content they want to see frees us from the pompous journalists who think that they own the news.  The ethics of show me everything takes the control out of the editors’ hands, removes the media companies’ filters and finally lets me decide what I think is best for me.  In short, the ethics of let the users decide are the ethics of true democracy.  After all what do we have to be so afraid of?