Bloblet's 2014

Bloblet’s take on EPIC 2014 reflects much of my response to the piece. I too find the 'doomsday' tone of voice and music irritating but apt for the post-apocalyptic setting in which it posits the world of journalism.

And as Sloan would readily accede this is not a so much a prophecy about an all-encompassing online world information system as a tool to engage consideration of journalism in a state of flux. Google’s extended reach is clearly topical – renewed talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide a viable alternative search engine were reported in this week’s Age Business section syndicated from the Guardian.

In these critical economic times, with media monopolies contracting and carrying more organisational-biased comment, and diversifying if they’re savvy – online media needs to be seen as a serious route. Moby Capital, which owns Tolo TV Afghanistan’s most popular television station, is an example of ‘independent’ media (since last May broadcasting also to North America and Europe) increasingly present online (ironically thanks to aggregation) and further diversified into a growing chain of internet coffee shops.

The New York Times example may illustrate that speculations like EPIC 2014/2015 are necessarily simplistic, but the growing collaborative media model is not.

In the global environment, Google aggregated news is usurping control and power of print media ironically while engaging print media content and 'traditional' print advertisers to do so. Print media’s tardiness to embrace the potential of the internet and to realise income opportunities (combined with the unwieldy and often localised pathway of copyright law) has allowed the information superhighway to increasingly displace print media.

In perhaps the greatest irony Rupert Murdoch, one of the world's biggest media moguls, argues that content is becoming more 'quantitative than qualitative', meanwhile shrinking newsrooms of his dailies and Fox News in a formalised content sharing portal that will see copy 'shared' from New York to London to Sydney. Certainly newsprint is becoming leaner with the global push for free content.

Like Wikipedia, content may be largely user-generated with abundant resources but a paucity of focussed research/rigourous editorial processes leading to questionable accuracy and to the infiltration of bias. If content is paid for according to demand i.e. popularity (GoogleZON) and customised to demographics, preferences and interests it has potential to become incredibly insular and trivialised as well as unimaginably powerful and nuanced for those prepared to sift and scrutinise voluminous content from a range of sources. It may also be susceptible to 'technical glitches' and/or 'hoaxes' that skew rankings.

EPIC is a very credible paradigm, if a little too easily bought into.