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« Democrats abroad: Vote, yah bahstahds! || Back to Blog | DOEP (Daily Open-Ended Puzzle) (intermittent): Last state » October 02, 2006
Ethanz's got an important post that says (roughly) those touting citizen journalism have spent too much time talking about the utility of having citizen reporters in spots where professionals reporters may not be and not enough time talking about citizen journalists as an enormous pool of expertise on topics regardless of geographic position. Bingo and baddabing! Ethanz's example is of the lost opportunity to call on people around the world with mathematical expertise to explain the substance of Grigoi Perelman's proof of Poincaire's conjecture. The miscellaneous world is reorganizing itself largely around topics because that's a—the?—fundamental unit of interest. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman citizen_journalism journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ] Posted
by D. Weinberger at October 2, 2006 06:06 PM
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Comments
when something as simple as a tag can be applied to video, audio, text, photography, products, etc. to archive and distribute information, the potential for newly formed topical community in a (many) centralized interface(s) is instantaneous, meshed and thoroughly deep.
when we all apply such indexing principles to our thoughts and actions -- online and off -- and leverage the infrastructure of the day to free it up!... man, we'll have a damn rich set of topical knowledge at our fingertips.
btw, i can't wait to get your book, david. ;)
Posted by: sean coon | October 2, 2006 08:31 PM
You already get my book, Sean :)
Posted by: David Weinberger | October 3, 2006 10:04 AM
citizen journalists as an enormous pool of expertise on topics regardless of geographic position.
Great point! I've thought about this quite a bit recently--esp. in relation to the concept of "hyperlocal" which often seems to be connected, in this country anyway, with the concept of "citizen journalism"
Ethan's post hits on this--what, exactly, is our own personal sense of "hyperlocal" and how do we fold that into our sense of "citizen journalism." Expertise--which can also be called "specialization--is hyperlocalized information. And, with the way in which many of us spend, perhaps, much more time online than we do within our physical communities (for various reasons) our levels of "expertise" become our "hyperlocal" citizen journalism beats!
Yet this concept isn't only applicable to information dissemination--rather, it can give us, as individuals, different senses of our identities, of where we "live" and how we present ourselves to others. Being someone who's been "rootless" for at least the past 6 years (due mostly to relocation to attend college and a desire never to return "home") I've found more of a sense of "community" and "neighborhood" in various forms of social media than in my own physical neighborhoods. That may change once I move to a place that is less crime-infested, but I will always have a sense that I "live" somewhere within the space we refer to as the blogosphere/internet because since '98, spent a great deal of time getting to know its geography and others who inhabit the space. Like any subculture or other country, it certainly does have its own rules, mores and language :-)
Posted by: tish grier | October 4, 2006 12:54 PM