A landmark Clay Shirky piece that I’ve just caught up with – in a nutshell, he argues that the widespread adoption of ICTs has made the concept of (media) consumers nonsensical. It rests on some problematic “before” assumptions about media audiences, making the “after” picture even more vibrant – i.e. that we were a passive and silent mass before, whereas now, “there are no more consumers, because in a world where an email address constitutes a media channel, we are all producers now.” As always, though, it’s a vigorous but loosely woven argument designed more to spark open debate than to close the book.

This optimism is reflected in the “we media” school of thought, as represented by hypergene, who have just released a white paper on the topic:

The venerable profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history where, for the first time its hegemony as gatekeeper of news is threatened, not just by new technologies and competitors, but by the audience it serves.

But it is questionable whether widespread popular access to the technologies of content production has resulted in any truly significant decentralisation of news thus far, according to Geert Lovink’s essay The Technology of News:

One of the biggest treats to the current weblog movement is branding and re-portalization. New media dishes out old media. This may be a truism but is there anything to be done about it? The inwardly turned postmodern theory may have developed a refined system of concepts, but these insights haven’t translated themselves into a general consciousness. News goes on being vulgar propaganda to most people. That’s that. At the same time everybody knows that there’s no truth hidden behind the lies. The intotainment wave hasn’t succeeded in taking away the unease. It is therefore a tremendous task to open up this deadlock and to come to new means of gathering news, presentation and distribution with the help of all available theories.

[Found via Metal Machine Music, via Anne Galloway.]

[And of course, we have to be sceptical of both the veracity and value of the term “democratization” anyway – have a look at the blogosphere ecosystem, for example, and note the identity groups, subject matter, and geographical locations of the “A-list” blogs]