by LiebeDich.
Science blogging versus journalism:
[Via Bad Astronomy]
I recently gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences about science blogging, social networking, and communication in general. I had a lot of fun, and the NAS has posted a podcast about the meeting with some excerpts of what I said (they have a list of older ‘casts …
[More]
This is a continuing discussion between those who see what the technology does (i.e. allow the rapid dissemination of unfiltered information) and those whose livelihood depends on doing the filtering of information (i.e. newsmedia, book and music publishers).
For the last few hundred years, information was hard to find, publish, disseminate and use, requiring the creation of experts to help filter it and properly present it. Filtering had to happen before publishing. Only the ‘best’ could be published.
Now, information is easy to find. It is cheap to publish and disseminate. Filtering happens after it is created or published. The best sites now have people who help provide better ‘post-publication’ filtering.
In the old style, the important aspects of filtering were analytical – the reporters, etc. had to take information and distill it into a simpler form, which could then be published. The costs of publishing forced this model.
Now, publishing is trivial and has little cost. The analytical approach, while still very valuable, is no longer the only mode. Synthetic approaches, where information from many different areas is brought together , where whole systems are examined at once, are now possible.
Blogs and aggregation sites are a part of this new approach. They are able to do things that no industrial age organization can do. They connect and filter the vast amount of information now available, allowing both analytical and synthetic approaches to be used in order to create knowledge.
The organizations that get this, that can see the benefit of not only analysis but synthesis of information, will be very successful. Those that do not, that do not really understand what is going on, will have to adapt or die.
Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0
