Masters of the Universe
Well, blow me. I thought this thing I laughably call a blog was just a bit of idle fun. A relaxing stroll along the information superhighway, with the occasional pause in a literary lay-by.
But it appears that I'm involved in nothing less than an opinion-shaking, news-breaking, earth-quaking enterprise to put me on a par with the mighty Gutenburg and the sainted Cronkite.
Don't take my word for it. Here's a proper journalist waxing historical on a revolution in the making:
"We [journalists] have spent our lives dominating conversations. No, that's wrong of course. We did not converse at all. We lectured. We provided the information that people feasted on in order to hold their own conversations.
But the odd "letter to the editor" aside, we were largely unaware of the content of those conversations. We moved on. We were the secular priests who decided what information to give the great unwashed and even told them how they should react to that information, what to think and what to do. Public service performed. Job done. How clever were were. How privileged.
In that old paradigm - to which many editors and journalists still cling - news was one-way traffic. We conceived it. We gathered it. We published it and broadcast it. It was justification enough that people bought our newspapers or tuned in to our radio and TV channels.
Blogging turns that model on its head. It allows people to question the information we provide. It allows them to produce their own information. It offers them a space to air their own views. The congregation is no longer in awe of the priests. Our supremacy is crumbling."
Crikey! You mean all that guff I write about Eurovision and getting sozzled in Manchester could actually change the universe? I'm truly humbled.
Photograph: Wikimedia Commons
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