Actually, I was sitting around the house listening to Pink Floyd and staring at my black light posters and thought "hey, why not try a new template." So that's what you're seeing. Pretty trippy, huh?
Speaking of Digg.com, is this really the future of journalism? In case you've been living under a rock, Digg is the site where rather than have editors decide what news stories make the front page, the users vote on the stories that interest them the most and create their own hierarchy of what is important and what isn't. For instance, as I write this the lead story on Yahoo News is the tornado that killed 19 in Alabama, while on Digg the lead story is a man who smokes through his eye socket (I'm not making that up).
So what conclusion can we media critics draw from the Digg phenomena? Hell if I know, but I'm from that generation that grew up with Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley filtering through the days news and separating out the important from the trivial. When I think of the news I think of the major events of the day, but for the Digg generation that is strictly "old school". Thanks to the internet we are now free to choose what is important to us, not to Walter Cronkite, and that's a good thing, right? Are there consequences we haven't considered?
Well, first off, we can forget about this notion of the internet creating a global community. In one sense it has because the entire world is now interconnected, but in the more profound sense the internet, rather than creating a global community, has instead created global networks of special interest sub-communities. Digg, for example, is primarily a tech site, and serves a worldwide community of tech enthusiasts, while a Ionarts.org might serve a worldwide community of classical music enthusiasts or a Myspace.com might serve a worldwide community of perverts and pedophiles. There are hundreds of thousands of other sites each catering to their niche, and it's all very specialized and very fragmented. For the techie looking for the hot hi-tech news or the music geek looking for the latest concert review, though, the internet is a dream come true.
So what's my point. Well, it seems that as we each begin to customize our global view and narrow our focus, we just might be losing the forest for the trees. Take the Iraq war, for instance. As I've said before this has got to be the strangest war in American history. We have armed forces overseas and people dying every day, and yet outside of the occasional speech or bumper sticker, the American public seems largely unaffected. I know some people like to compare this war to the Viet Nam war, but, on the home front at least, it's not even close. Believe me, back then the Viet Nam war was topic number one on everybody's agenda, and when Walter Cronkite hinted that the war might be a lost cause, everybody paid attention.
That's not true of this war, and I'm proposing that maybe it's because of the changing nature of how we receive our news. The war in Iraq isn't topic one because it simply isn't on our home pages, or in our RSS readers, or at the top of the list at Digg.com. It's not part of this little niche that occupies so much of our lives, and I suppose that the big news organizations are the primary reason we are so distracted. After all, for a generation that has been raised on "news as entertainment", why shouldn't the big story of the day be some guy who smokes through his eyeballs?
Well, it's just a thought, and I'm not criticizing Digg.com. Even though I'm not enough of a geek to use if much, it's pretty clear that the Digg model of user edited content is the future. I'm just not sure where it's all leading.
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