Information is an activity.
Information is a life form.
Information is a relationship.
John Perry Barlow
This is sure to be my library school mantra because I often rely upon Barlow’s “The Economy of Ideas” in order to illustrate just how vital the library is to its community. Barlow’s “taxonomy of information” is also a good study to help drive home the point that we just cannot underestimate the nature and power of information and its dissemination, whether it be through a book, a DVD, a program in Meeting Room 2, or social media.*
However, after reading “New Media, Old Media: How Blogs and Social Media Agendas Relate and Differ from the Traditional Press” and “Experts Weigh Pros and Cons of Social Media,” I could not help but note the similarities between news as information and social media to the game of Telephone, in which one person whispers a sentence to his/her neighbor, and it continues likewise down the line. The conclusion is when the last person states out loud a completely different sentence. Consider the following from “New Media, Old Media:”
· “News today is increasingly a shared, social experience. Half of Americans say they rely on the people around them to find out at least some of the news they need to know.”
· “…technology makes it increasingly possible for the actions of citizens to influence a story’s total impact.”
On the other hand, while the experts in Ordonez’s article point out the good aspects of social media in regard to journalism, they also describe the bad: Matt Hinckley describes how erroneous reporting, accepted as fact, can lead to “infotainment,” and Trevor Butterworth describes that inherent in Twitter is the “capacity to reflect and create chaos.”
Well! Information is indeed alive! It is also living proof that if you are in need of pursuing some form of factual data, your local reference librarian is your go-to person!
Barlow, John Perry. “The Economy of Ideas.” Wired. March 1994.
“New Media, Old Media.” Journalism.org. 23 May 2010.
Ordonez, Sandra. “Experts Weight Pros and Cons of Social Media.” MediaShift. 16 August 2010.
*By the way, Barlow—who just happens to be a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, as well as a cattle rancher--uses a great metaphor in his discussion about copyrights. He suggests that in regard to authorship that “the value was in the conveyance and not in the thought conveyed. In other words, the bottle was protected, not the wine.” It is a very thought-provoking article on a very complex topic (maybe the lawyer/librarian has some thoughts on copyright law or intellectual property?), and I highly recommend it if you have not already read it.
