The piece you're about to read is by Luisetta Mudie, a freelance journalist and student of psyche currently

living in a small town to the north of London, United Kingdom. She is attempting to synthesise her own
fragmented experience, which includes many years as a reporter and editor in wire services, magazines,
Web-based news and broadcasting. It was peer-commissioned by her friend Rebecca Mackinnon, who
heard her voice these ideas verbally and asked her to post them to a blog.

Concentration and fragmentation in the media

"Information can be defined as a difference that makes a difference." -- Gregory

Bateson, Mind and Nature

The dominant and primary process in the mass media market is currently one of
centralisation; a concentration of journalistic activity under the aegis of just a handful of
mega-corporations. But every primary process generates the seeds of its opposite within
itself, and for journalists, that secondary process, often experienced as disturbing and
difficult when it begins, is one of fragmentation.

The fragmentation that is generated comes as a reaction to the powerful forces which are
currently homogenising our world view in the form of more and more news, but more
and more of the same news. It is already visible in the concept of market differentiation,
whereby the consumer is offered more and more choices. The only problem with this is,
unless the products step outside the unifying and petrifying energy of the urge to
centralise, they will not bring true difference, only more sameness.

These processes are represented at every level, within the current U.S.-centric world
order at the level of geopolitics, within the mass media market and the corporate
conglomerates which make it up, and within individuals. The primary process has the
effect of alienating the consumers of news who aspire to any sort of wider consciousness
of what is going on in the world, and also many of the providers of news, the journalists
themselves.

Both journalists and consumers are dealing with this tension in their own way, and
strangely, their attempts to do so have blurred the boundaries between them. 'Consumers',
now re-imagined as intelligent voters and political activists, have set up their own
alternative Web sites to look at views from outside the primary process (U.S. power,
centralised media, the urge for a unified perspective, which after all, is simpler and more
reassuring than a complicated and messy one.). Journalists are doing the same, blogging,
going freelance, no longer happy to churn out news stories which suit their paymasters'
limited requirements. It seems that over-centralised cultural and economic processes
require consumers, and that's why there is a patina of virtue over the idea of consumption.
But a heavy focus on mass patterns of consumption forgets the complexity of the
individual. Even the most dedicated and uneducated consumer can rebel, suddenly and
apparently inexplicably.

The new breed of information users overlaps in many areas with the new breed of
information providers, to provide news and perspectives which are bottom-up, rooted in a
sense of community (wherever that is found, sometimes on-line), and interactive. The
sense of loose and flexible cohesion in these groupings of intention is reminiscent of a
model of group behaviour of agents, part of the new sciences of complexity, called Boids.

The mode is anarchic, yet organised. Anarchic in the sense that there is no patriarchal
top-down command structure which regulates behaviour, but with a handful of simple
rules about distance and closeness relative to one's neighbours. A horizontally connected
peer validation system. Journalists in this environment are increasingly aware that their
audience is also their peer group.

Unfortunately, while there is quite properly a large amount of life-force invested in the
secondary process, there is not yet much money. The new breed-let's call them informers,
because they not only provide information, they also in some sense are the information;
they in-form the secondary process-these informers are having instead to bear the
fragmentation in their personal and economic lives, for example by disconnecting their
'real' job of helping this evolutionary process, from the money that puts food in their
mouths and clothes on their back, and a roof over their head. Cross-subsidy is a hallmark
of their enterprise.

What are the implications of this concept of informer? It's not a thing in itself, but an
attempt to re-imagine the boundaries of news and information. Under this paradigm, the
personality, experience and knowledge of the informer becomes a virtue, because it is no
longer outlawed by the collective bias of a large corporation or even country. Informers
come out of the closet, in a sense, as the people they are doing the job that they do. If
money is to flow into this process and give it the vivification and appearance of
legitimacy that it needs, it is likely to happen in a granular sort of way, using cooperative
or micro-credit models.

Recent studies in neurobiology and psychoanalysis have found that the mapping of
metaphor, one pattern expressed in terms of another, is at the heart of brain function and
psychic activity. In the article linked below, Arthur H. Modell talks about open and
closed metaphors, how the mapping of similarities which also allows for difference,
which is contained enough to be meaningful, but open-ended enough to allow further
movement, is the most fruitful kind. Closed metaphors, such as those perpetrated by
authoritarian regimes and immortalised as kitsch, are found in psychopathology.

In his paper on civil society, Rainer Baub asks what are the basic features of voluntary
associations within the inner core of civil society? The minimum criteria for
voluntariness in associations refer to entry and exit, he concludes. Membership is
acquired voluntarily, i.e. neither by birth, nor automatically, nor under coercion and
members can leave the association freely.

He adds that some degree of internal democracy is usually involved, but also
"associational pluralism", which means people have a choice. Civil societies also lack the
means of coercion, or the capacity to dominate the life prospects of their members.
"This contrasts with the rigid role requirements and the power of coercion exercised by
the state, the family, and in employment. Voluntary associations may be seen as a
training-ground for citizens where they learn the virtues of civility."

Civility, then, implies diversity and pluralism, and the ability of a citizen to tolerate the
lack of a top-down value structure, the lack of fixity of meaning.

I see two areas of relevance here for informers in the new medium. One is the process by
which centralisation of news over-emphasises the "I provide, you consume" model, with
the result that exchange is minimised, and metaphors become more and more closed and
self-serving. The other is that the most successful informers in the new market will be
those who take people out of the old paradigm, but not so far or so fast that chaos rules.
In this context, chaos would mean a breakdown of the value system inherent in the
information; a breakdown of grass-roots networks of trust and peer validation.

Links:

Rebecca Mackinnon's blog

Techjournalism : Home Page

Posted by Mearcstapa at 7:34 PM 0 comments
Peer journalism

We Media - The Media Center @ API

Posted by Mearcstapa at 7:28 PM 0 comments

What are Boids, anyway?

Boids (Flocks, Herds, and Schools: a Distributed Behavioral Model)

Posted by Mearcstapa at 7:21 PM 0 comments

John Fraim on the mass media in much more depth:

CG Jung Page
Posted by Mearcstapa at 7:19 PM 0 comments

Arnold H. Mindell

? PSYCHOMEDIA - SCIENCE AND THOUGHT