I think this is why the "cancel culture" moral panic gets under my skin so much. *So* many of Americans' false unof people and events come from the fact that the media was traditionally run by a tiny number of gatekeepers.

Share buttons and prompts to “read more” treat readers like idiots who don’t know how to do basic tasks; meanwhile, a huge amount of faith is put in technology, which fails constantly. Embedded social media posts don’t load properly, videos expire, and the pre-populated tweet mangles the text. If there are high-res photos, they are often too large to display on a standard laptop screen, so one first looks at a face and much later scrolls to see a body. Should the poor reader decide to navigate the site’s categories via the drop-down menu, they must maneuver the mouse like a tight-rope walker, lest the proper choice vanish before they can click on it.

The shift to an organized industry also has political implications—and not just because journalists are becoming more active through their union work. In the larger scheme of things, unionized media workers are starting to see the world and themselves in a new light. Journalism, like other creative-but-poor industries, is predicated on the idea that its practitioners are just lucky to be doing what they love; they’ve long been conditioned to believe that there’s something inherently prestigious, even noble, about this type of white-collar work. But as media jobs become more precarious, undermined by the same monopoly forces affecting workers in other parts of the economy, media workers are increasingly seeing themselves as workers first. This is what Marxist-minded leftists have long termed class consciousness, and that consciousness is spreading, within legacy and digital media brands alike. [...] To reclaim the foundations of a free press in America, media workers need to get serious about dismantling tech monopolies and implementing policies that would reverse our new Gilded Age. It seems to be no coincidence that countries that operate the freest press regimes, such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland, also have comparatively low income-inequality. The Jonah Perettis of the world think that they can solve the media crisis in isolation, without acknowledging that they are integral to and have benefited from the system that gave rise to this crisis in the first place. [...] What’s more, union activism can help bridge the yawning power dynamic that now separates tech monopolies from the flailing media sector. Tech companies will have to feel threatened if they’re going to implement reforms and meet media companies more than halfway—and the companies themselves clearly pose no threat at all. The way the media business works now is that Facebook and Google and Apple News reap the bulk of the profits produced by the labor of journalists—either by leapfrogging the ownership structure entirely or enlisting short-sighted owners, who mostly compete with one another, to give away their content for a pittance.

People are so sensitive these days! People are just offended by every little thing! Millennials, amirite?! --- Are there people upset about stupid nonsense? Absolutely. If it becomes “a thing,” however, it’s because the media made it “a thing.”

This is supposed to be funny and fascinating, but I find it mostly sad. These people don’t need snark, they need mental health care.

I was pleased to see the measured tone of the White House response to the citizen petition about SOPA and PIPA, and yet I found myself profoundly disturbed by something that seems to me to go to the root of the problem in Washington: the failure to correctly diagnose the problem we are trying to solve, but instead to accept, seemingly uncritically, the claims of various interest groups.

"Let me think about that." In other words: with a glut of information, we're trying to form opinions and take action on it all just as fast as it's coming in, and we're suffering for it.

"Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects."

Because there's no alternative, and it is valuable. But its privacy practices are awful.

Basically: Publishing solves a problem that no longer exists, and we don't need newspapers; we need journalism. Amen.

The head of a company that makes videos go viral explains exactly how it's done. The commenters go crazy. Very interesting in the specific sense, but even more so in the overall evolution of media.

Andrew Keen's "The Cult of the Amateur" says the internet is destroying culture, but he himself built this book without any of the professional skills he claims are so important. On the Colbert Report, said there was nothing wrong with elitism.