The New Paradigm for Media

With the proliferation of the Internet and cheap access to a broadband connection, use of the Internet as a form of mass media has become a reality. This mass media, however, is somewhat different from the old paradigm and comes with its own set of rules.
In the past, large corporations fed information to a passive audience, telling them what was believed to be important and essentially dictating public discourse. With the introduction of the Internet, this is not always the case anymore. people have access to a nearly infinite store of free or cheap information, and have the ability to express themselves or what is going on around them as they see fit. This could not happen in the past. As discussed in class, this creates special interest "niche" groups: small collections of people that have more expertise in a particular field than the average person, and consume information catered to that interest.
At first glance, this seems like a threat to the stability of the old mass media architecture. If people want to consume information particular to their interest, they will no longer turn to the companies that have tried to please the most people; they will instead turn to their Internet communities. Not necessarily so. The mass media provides a backbone of validity that the chaotic structure of the Internet does not have. Information presented on the news has been carefully validated and checked for inconsistencies, because the survival of a mass media network hinges on this. The peer produced network on the Internet relies less on this and more on the fast, self correcting nature of its structure. An Internet community will likely have information out sooner than a mass media network, but that information does not have the backing from the validation process and may or may not be correct.
These two models are different and should be treated as such. It seems though, that the new peer produced system has not yet fully developed. This is clear when watching CNN. Since the explosion of blogs on the Internet, CNN has begun to report on the blogosphere, making note of what bloggers think about the issues. Also, in a recent article from class, it's obvious that the mass media still looks at the networked communities through the eyes of the old system. As CNN described it, the blogs "scooped" traditional media with the Foley scandal. I would venture to say that a blog cannot "scoop" traditional media because they operate on completely different principles. Yes, the blog may have had the information more quickly, but blogs bring the information to their audience in a different way than say NBC. Generally, this information tends to be laced in opinion and caters to a more specific audience, which may have a bias in one direction or another; more of a measure of what people think about what is going on than what people think is going on.
In the end, the rules of play are different but compatible. A cursory look at popular interactive new sites like digg shows that oftentimes, the information present in these peer-produced groups is really editorial of the validated fact that comes from the larger mass media network. It seems to me that the future lies in mass media collecting the information, and the peer produced media packaging it for the consumer in a less passive way.