Jour 4551
After reading Andrew Keen’s “Cult of the Amateur,” It makes complete sense to me that some blogs are bad and wikipedia is not completely reliable, but then a lot of mainstream writing is ill-informed and bad too. Is YouTube really more sarcastic and stupid than television?
The essential problem for people today has not really changed: there are a lot of sources of information and we must somehow decide which ones to trust. We must check our facts from several sources and beware of politicial bias. Of course many were not doing this when using the traditional media like newspapers or magazines.
Blogs actually allow more experts to express their views in public, and they can also discuss narrow areas of interest with great detail, where coverage in the traditional media does not exist or is too brief.
In the 'old world' media, the 'experts' were chosen by an elite such as producers, editors and owners who could indeed have their own agenda, and their own desire to alter the real story. With blogs, as with everything else we must exercise our judgement and experience to decide which voices to trust and which we can ignore.