I, Cockroach!
Henry Jenkins in the MIT Technology Review kicks off his article about blogging with an irresistable image, of bloggers 'like cockroaches after nuclear war, online diarists rule and Internet strewn with failed dot coms'but he goes on to make a more serious point:
"It may seem strange to imagine the blogging community as a force that will shape the information environment almost as powerfully as corporate media. We learn in the history books about Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph but not about the thousands of operators who shaped the circulation of messages, about Thomas Paine’s Common Sense but less about the “committees of correspondence” through which citizens copied and redistributed letters across the colonies, about the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist blockbuster Uncle Tom’s Cabin but not about the teenagers who used toy printing presses to publish nationally circulated newsletters debating the pros and cons of slavery. In practice, the evolution of most media has been shaped through the interactions between the distributed power of grass-roots participatory media and the concentrated power of corporate/governmental media."
It does seem strange though that Jenkins doesn't connect the dots and conclude what an advantage todays 'unseen shapers' have over those that came before them, by virtue of that Internet thing going on. (via Adam Curry)
12:07:49 PM 
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