What's it about?

essays schmessays



500 words is like easy peasy. As Alvin said, what is is about?

banging your metaphoric head against the table may cause your metaphoric hairs to fall out.

I think he meant he only wrote 500 words so far. He mentioned something about a dissertation earlier.

Yeah the essays 7000 words, the way I'm dealing with it is by looking at each chapter as an essay.



heres the title:



The death of the audience, how the crowd is using the collapse of cost of information production and distribution to fundamentally change how we view and consume the news.

phew! And how is the crowd using the collapse...?

The crowd just collapsed!

I had to write a literature review which gave a short introduction to what I'd be talking about:



Through out my dissertation I will discuss the idea that for the past 150 years we have lived in an industrial information economy. That the cost of information production and distribution was so prohibitive that it dictated a one to many form of communication, a limited number of information producers with access to extremely large amounts of capital create the content and the audience consumes it. What’s more, the fact that the cost of information production was so high meant it was impossible for the audience to discuss and criticise the news sources making the audience passive.

The cost of information production and distribution has collapsed. The tools once in the hands of the few (the professional class) is now in the hands of roughly 600 million to a billion people globally (Benkler 2006). It’s a change so large and significant the only example we have that resembles it is the invention of the printing press that completely replaced the scribes that had copied and maintained books for thousands of years.

I will discuss how the collapse of cost of communication tools has led to brand new ways of producing news (such as mass collaboration), who produces the news and how we decide what news is. I will show that whilst our ability to produce news is infinite our ability to consume it isn't (we are still influenced by our need to eat, sleep, work and be social) and how we are developing filters to provide us with the most relevant and interesting news (for each individual). Finally I will discuss the weaknesses of mass collaboration, how it can be undermined and the position of the old media in the new information ecosystem.