Free Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

everyone else’s, resulting in a population who believes its uninformed opinions are as valid as those of experts who have actually studied a particular problem. (I can even sense readers bridling at the word “experts” in the preceding sentence, as if I have fallen into the trap of valuing an elite over the more reliable and incorruptible gut sense of real people.) College students often ask me why anyone should pay for professional journalism when there are plenty of people out there, like themselves, willing to write blogs for free? One answer is that government and corporations are investing millions of dollars into their professional communications campaigns. We deserve at least a few professionals working full-time to evaluate all this messaging and doing so with some level of expertise in ascertaining the truth.
    Young people are not alone in their skepticism about the value of professional journalism. A 2010 Gallup Poll showed Americans at an under 25 percent confidence in newspapers and television news—a record low. 23 Pew Research shows faith in traditional news media spiking downward as Internet use spikes upward, and that a full 42 percent believe that news organizations hurt democracy. This is twice the percentage who believed that in the mid-1980s, before the proliferation of the net. 24
    As cultural philosopher Jürgen Habermas offered during his acceptance speech of a humanitarian award in 2006, “The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.” 25 To be sure, the rise of citizen journalism brings us information that the mainstream media lacks either the budget for or fortitude to cover. Initial reports of damage during Hurricane Katrina came from bloggers and amateur videographers. However, these reports also inflated body counts and spread rumors about rape and violence in the Superdome that were later revealed not to have occurred. 26 Footage and reporting from the Arab Spring and the Syrian revolution—where news agencies were limited or banned—were almost entirely dependent on amateur journalists. But newsgathering during a bloody rebellion against a violently censorious regime is an outlier example and hardly the basis for judging the efficacy of amateur journalism in clarifying issues or explaining policy.
    If anything, such heroism under fire, combined with the general public’s access to blogging technology and professional-looking website templates, gives us all the false sense that we are capable of researching and writing professional-quality journalism about anything. In fact, most of us are simply making comments about the columns written by other bloggers, who are commenting on still others. Just because we all have access to blogging software doesn’t mean we should all be blogging, or that everyone’s output is as relevant as everyone else’s. Today’s most vocal critic of this trend,
The Cult of the Amateur
author Andrew Keen, explains, “According to a June 2006 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 34 percent of the 12 million bloggers in America consider their online ‘work’ to be a form of journalism. That adds up to millions of unskilled, untrained, unpaid, unknown ‘journalists’—a thousandfold growth between 1996 and 2006—spewing their (mis)information out in the cyberworld.” More sanguine voices, such as City University of New York journalism professor and BuzzFeed blogger Jeff Jarvis, argue that the market—amplified by search results and recommendation engines—will eventually allow the better journalism to rise to the top of the pile. But even market mechanisms may have a hard time functioning as we consumers of all this media lose our ability to distinguish between facts, informed opinions, and wild assertions.
    Our impatient disgust with politics as usual combined with our