Whenever the “media conglomerates control America” argument rolls around, it’s easy to pass it off as watchful paranoia at best and mad ravings at worst. Sometimes, the arguments are so poorly conceived they can ignored completely.

As bad as anyone wants to pretend media control in the United States, North Korea is worse than anything we have ever had. According to a 2006 report on media censorship by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ):

“The world’s deepest information void, communist North Korea has no independent journalists, and all radio and television receivers sold in the country are locked to government-specified frequencies.”

This is the same country that just threatened the United States with “miserable destruction.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that North Korea is entirely unfit to make that claim. (Though North Korea is also in need of rocket scientists.)

I believe that by keeping their people in dark, the government of North Korea has similarly disillusioned themselves. By letting any public media outlet atrophy without competition or innovation, real information has become scarce. A glimpse of the dream-like world of false information can be seen in the following propaganda video:

Not to say state-run media outlets are always the devil. The BBC and Al-Jazeera are owned by Great Britain and Qatar respectively and both are well respected media sources.  The United States has similar public media, PBS and NPR, though they are not owned directly by the government.

By looking at international media models, we can see there is no magic bullet to media ownership. A state-run media outlet may be free from the threat of advertising taking over content but it also runs the risk of becoming a government puppet.

I would much prefer my media selling out to Coke and Pepsi than to Kim Jung-Un. So while there will always be critics of the US and it’s media model, I still believe we have one of the better functioning media in the world. At least if this country does experience “miserable destruction” we will know about it.

Pope Benedict XVI started tweeting last December. Two months laters, he becomes the first Pope in 600 years to step down voluntarily. These events are not unrelated. Twitter, which has already found Kony and liberated Libya, has toppled the Pope.

A face only his followers could love. Photo from Twitter.

But the mistress that lured away the Pope has turned cruel quickly. The news of his resignition generated over 1.5 million Twitter comments in a day and a half. Not all of them were positive:

“We are receiving tweets that I consider not worthy of a human person,” said Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, head of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

 

Twitter is only the latest in a history of proving true Marshall McLuhan’s theory of technological determinism, in which he coined the phrase “the media is the message.” Twitter has taken some of the attention away from more real issues that could have possibly affected the resignation, such as scandal cover-ups.

It’s natural for the Pope to get intertwined in the new media. Benedict XVI used Twitter in an effort to assert himself as a more modern Pope.  This itself also created minor controversy as it was unprecedented. This can be taken as a sign that the Vatican is itself trying to become more modern.

However, instead of updating their stance on social policy (homosexuality, abortion) to reflect the changes in popular attitudes, a Papal aide created a Twitter account. Both the media covering the Vatican and the Vatican itself seem content to allow Twitter to be their story.

Though their stance on social issues may not be changing in the foreseeable future, the medium by which we receive the message may undergo drastic change. Following with the ideas in McLuhan’s theory of technological determinism, the message from the Vatican will be shaped by the new medium whether they want it to or not.

While the comments the Pope received may have been ugly and “not worthy of a human person,”someone high up in the Vatican had to seem them. The message got through. Hopefully the message that is returned by The Vatican responds to these criticisms without succumbing to the uglier aspects of social media.

The last time I was crowd-surfing was at Warped Tour a couple years ago. I was struck by the kindness and solidarity of the 2,000-odd sweaty revelers. When a great circle pit erupted in front of my crowd-surf flight-plan I was gently let down at the edge. When everything I owned spilled out of my pockets, those who carried me were quick to help recover my stuff.

I’ve heard crowd-sourcing media content is a lot like crowd surfing at a concert. Just as crowd-surfing supports the scrawny bodies of 16-years-old to occupationally frustrated security at the front of the stage, crowd sourcing supports the pretentious ideas of unemployed 26-year-old to occupationally frustrated editors at  The Guardian.

After years of show us what we are told we want, the one-way highway that was the media of old has built us bike lane going the opposite way. For example, Conan created a whole show a week ago out of clips sent in from viewers.

CNN will occasionally allow website viewers to select what video clip is played on the TV news report. Recently they’ve also made expanding use of their iReport feature, which allows anyone to upload newsworthy media.

Sometimes the crowdsourcing is subtler, like the recursive scenario of searching to word “crowd source” on Google.  All the search results are pulled from other sources and the order of the list is partially determined by crow sourced user data on the websites themselves. Just Googling crowdsourcing is crowdsourcing in action.

In the subtle arena, there isn’t a lot of room for creative feedback. But in the first, more direct approaches of crowdsourcing we could see more individualized, unique content. While the Conan episode was unprecedented in user content, it was all based on his previously aired show and everyone operated within that boundary.

I would bet that in the near future of crowdsourcing we see a shift from viewers choosing predefined to content towards users creating and selecting the content. It’s cheaper and easier for a show’s producer and it pulls viewers in.

Wikipedia stands as a shining beacon of crowd-sourced potential. While not without faults, it provides both a constantly expanding pool of current information and an easy punchline for every high school English teacher going over the research paper rubric.

Image from http://xkcd.com