Everyone's a Critic
The old saw was that everyone’s a critic. What this meant was that opinions were cheap, everyone had them, and everyone was willing to given vent to them at a moment’s notice. In the days before the dawn of time (or before the dawn of the Internet), these kinds of opinions were usually disseminated in bars, pool halls, coffee shops, restaurants, or a few other social milieus. But in essence these were forums with a heavily circumscribed audience, usually consisting of the speaker’s buddies (also, mainly inebriated).
Where am I going with this? Well, in the 21st century, criticism has hardly gone out-of-vogue. Except, now the critic has become the superstar. The advent of the bloggerati and the mega blogs like Instapundit has meant that the aspiring journalist/commentator no longer has to toil away in some dingy newsroom for some anonymous local paper for 20 years before getting his/her “break” and seeing his/her opinion writ large in the mouths of talking heads and the words of political speechwriters.
Rather, all one needs is a healthy dose of wit, a penchant for provocation, and above all, a catchy URL. Oh yes, and a legion of adoring internauts, who hang on your every posting. Fittingly, to tap into this current, some companies have even taken to hiring writers to create fake blogs (or flogs) with the intention of dissimulating grassroots journalism and manufacturing hype.
But what is striking about this new form of commentating isn’t how political or polemical it is, but rather how immediately it enables the reader to gauge the pulse of the day. I checked out Technorati’s listings of the most happening sites in the blogosphere. At number one was Engadget , a hardcore techie’s heaven. In the course of half a day, the editors at Engadget had already posted 19 updates. Other than CNN and Fox News, most networks will have 3 daily news updates (noon, 6 o’clock, and late-night news). Your average daily paper prints one edition, two if you’re really lucky. Time magazine comes out once per week. Are you getting the picture?
More than anything, the new journalism has shown the value of informational immediacy. Instead of tracking the evolution of a story over a week or a month, it is now tracked over a day, or an hour. Instead of snapshot listening, it’s continuous listening (you knew it had to tie back into iPerceptions at some point).
