New vs. Old Media

Lawyer Jack Balkin was asked “How do you see the new media and old media affecting and influencing each other in the next five years?”  His answer, as posted on Balkinization, follows:

Although bloggers like to think of themselves as bravely checking and critiquing old media, and parts of old media still regard bloggers as uncouth, unaccountable, and unreliable, in fact new media and old media (viewed both as a set of distinctive technologies and as a set of persons and social practices) have effectively merged much more than either would care to admit.

Reporters now regularly use bloggers, particularly expert bloggers, as sources for their stories. Newspapers, television networks and newsmagazines increasingly incorporate interactive elements in their online versions, sponsor their own blogs, and provide linkbacks to the blogs that discuss their stories. These trends, which have begun in earnest in the past year or so, will only accelerate as time goes on, as traditional media organizations work out the kinks of how to integrate interactivity into their business models. (Eventually, of course, broadcast television and internet video will merge as content delivery methods, and online delivery of text will increasingly dominate paper delivery.)

The most heavily linked to opinion and expert blogs, and aggregator blogs (i.e., blogs which primarily collect links to what other blogs are doing) make it increasingly easy for mainstream media to know what is going on in the blogosphere and to use this as information sources, as ideas or raw materials for new stories, and as a rough estimate of public opinion.

Interactivity will transform old media, which will not give up the ghost, but will instead use its considerable political and financial clout to draw important elements of the blogosphere ever closer to it, coopting and transforming them, even though many parts of the blogosphere will always remain beyond old media's grasp.

What mainstream media has to offer the blogosphere are money, advertising and links (i.e., traffic). Although the structure of the Internet guarantees that bloggers can generate some degree of traffic on their own, mainstream media platforms, because of their prominence, will help secure a disproportionate share of traffic and attention, and therefore will become (even more than today) important nodal points in the blogosphere, much to the chagrin of some bloggers and the delight of others.

Of course, the more that old media tries to coopt the blogosphere, the more it will itself be transformed. The result, I am afraid, will not be an unalloyed victory for decentralization or democracy, nor will it represent the end of powerful shapers of public opinion who occasionally abuse their power. Rather, it will instead produce a different distribution of power and a different set of dangers and responsibilities.

Just as political parties learned how to manipulate mainstream media in order to structure public debate and deliver their preferred messages, they are learning how to coopt, manipulate (and in some cases become part of) the blogosphere in order to shape public opinion. Increasingly, opinion makers (both in political parties and in the business world) have a multi-pronged strategy that attempts to influence both old and new media. Although the blogosphere regards itself as far too large and too diffuse to be manipulated by powerful political and financial interests, this is surely not so, and the degree of this influence will become even more obvious as time goes on. Nevertheless, the decentralization of the blogosphere and its characteristic architecture (of log normal or powerlaw distributions) allows a degree of countervailing power, which, I continue to hope, will not be extinguished. The revolution is real.