access the power of media
Chomsky proposed that there are two kinds of people. One where they shapes our society and one where they do what they have been told. I suppose the old economy has resulted in a lot of people from the second group, which supports the concept where readers will consume news without question.
If it corresponds to my theory of fractal democracy and we apply the adoptability of hubs into this issue, we can see that the most of the people are late majority. The people that really shape the society are the hubs, the first adopters, the early majority.
The old top-down network with media telling us what the news is and controlling our thinking will be similar to a centralized network. The central hub will be the media, which will be the only source that distributes news to us.The new journalism in the blogosphere opens up a new scale-free network. Readers can choose whichever link they wish to join as it interests they perspective. Power will be distributed, without a control on what news we will be consuming and what we think about what is happening to our world.
The idea of looking at media as the top-down network is so interesting. I would have to agree on this. However, I would also like to bring up the point about the justification of weblogs. There are arguments saying that weblogs are too overpowered by ads. The commercialization of Weblogs issue discussed by Robin Good and Jason Kottke is a good place to start looking at the power struggle of the scale-free network Loretta mentioned about. There are webloggers who mention certain companies just because they are sponsored by those companies. Will marketing always be dominated by ads? If we study the network/hub/emergence network well enough can we escape the marketing cliche and maybe recreate a marketing system that enable a scale-free network? (but wait, do we really want a scale-free network?) Is the old top-down media system taking over?
I have this crazy idea thinking that maybe the top-down media system and the new scale-free network all work together to create a hegemony for the society? It’s the monopoly of one dominating media network.
