AG on New Media

As Professor Rich Gordon highlights, Convergence is a tricky thing to define. Gordon latches on to Ithiel de Sola Pool’s explanation:

“The current convergence between historically separated modes of communication lies in the habitability of digital electronics. Conversation, theater, news and text are all increasingly delivered electronically … [E]lectronic technology is bringing all modes of communications into one grand system.”

Not only is this exciting, but it is already happening for me in a real, concrete way. There are two obvious examples of how converged media directly benefit me as a student here at Northwestern. First is something almost everyone here can relate to: NUTV. Second is the Byzantine-yet-powerful Voice-over-IP telephony system I rely on.

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In chapter 3 of “We the Media,” Gillmor highlights one way that the Internet has already made journalism better; bloggers and other citizens can act as the watchdogs of the watchdogs of democracy. To summarize (later in the book) Gillmor quotes early blogger Ken Layne: “We can Fact Check your ass,” (187).

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In Chapter 2 of “We the Media,” Dan Gillmor gives a brief overview of the technologies that make citizen journalism possible. Though already outdated (note how his discussion of the expense of delivering video on the Web is no longer valid thanks to services like Google Video, YouTube and clones), the most important argument he makes is for RSS feeds. RSS is important not because it can deliver headlines to your desk, but because it is a precursor to the Web service future; RSS is an early mechanism designed to atomize content and free it from any particular display device.

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Read on for “Saturday Morning Ballet with Jake Laub” or check out a full-resolution version on Depot.

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My proposal and storyboard for the midterm assignment are available for download as PDFs after the jump…
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Cheryl Diaz Meyer’s piece on digital photojournalism in Afghanistan revealed two new “truths” of journalism today: the importance of a deep understanding of the tools we use daily and the value of the Internet as a reporting aid.

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