This has created a pool of workers willing to labor on faith for less money than anyone could possible live on in order to maintain the media’s centrality to our understanding of one another, and to the worlds we imagine we live in.
(via New App Uses GPS Data To Turn Anyone With An iPhone Into A Photojournalist)
This is such a McLuhanesque way to view news. I think he is probably bitter about this at heart, but the description of the way things are in terms of news media from the perspective of creators and users is startlingly unsettling. He goes on to note that the media as technological communication channels radio, have created a “…collective memory in which the affect of the media itself is as significant as the information being transmitted through it.”
We are producing news stories because we’ve become attached or even addicted to the rush of media, “…In many ways the news event has become a pretext for justifying our ongoing romance with the technology that transmits it. “
The tie-in here to how this makes journalism a vocation and undermines it as a career which could support a working person has the ring of truth, don’t you think?
Barbara K Iverson 