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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

the future of the fourth estate « Previous | |Next »
November 8, 2010

Alan Rusbridger has a long blog on the future of the fourth estate at The Guardian. He divides the fourth estate into three:

There is the press, mostly still privately owned and lightly regulated, which was all we had until the dawn of broadcasting. Then there are public service broadcasters – publicly owned and, in return, pretty stringently regulated in terms of content, balance, impartiality and so on. Finally, there is the new public sphere opened up by digital technologies. (I need a catchier term for this. "Social media" I find a bit deadening.) Without getting into the debates about net neutrality, one might say that no one (yet?) "owns" or regulates this new third division of the fourth estate.

Anthony Barnett in his response The Web Estate: a response to Alan Rusbridger at Open Democracy rejects this division:
What Alan calls the press I see as the MSM, the main-stream media...The MSM includes the BBC...A subsection of the MSM is public service broadcasting or PSB..In the UK, public broadcasting of this kind is now almost monopolised by the BBC. Alan concedes this by heading his section on PSB simply ‘The BBC’. But they are not the same...e badly need more PSB, I agree. But it is a colossal mistake to put it into the hands of a single institution as this exposes the idea to continuous attack, thanks to the distortions of it being monopolised.

Barnett says that the digital sphere or the digital public is called the web, adding that:
in the next fifteen to twenty years the web will become the publishing medium of everything. Everything: news, magazines, books, advertising, articles, video, music, movies, TV, shopping, education, diaries, maps, thoughts, votes, prayers, branding and ‘facetime’. You name it, the web will publish, broadcast or deliver it and in the process mash it, creating new combinations. The web will deliver to the flat screen you roll up and put in your backpack, back pocket or purse, to the watch on your wrist, to your phone, television, radio, tablet and computer.

He says that the question is: what forms will be developed within the web? Will the MSM be able to find some that can reassert their domination online? Will new web corporations like Google gain irreversible full-spectrum dominance? Will its revenues, this is the killer question, be shared or oligopolised?

I would add that the digital public is becoming an important voice within the fourth estate; a voice that is a gain for journalism. This new digital public already enriches traditional journalism, but it isn't replacing it.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:32 PM |