What are you going to write about?
The last few days I kept telling everybody: “I got a blog!!!” And everybody answered: “Cool, but what are you going to write about?” So, dear everybody, here you go.
Three things I will try to do with this blog. Two are for you, the reader and one is for me, the writer.
1. News (reader)
2. Stories (reader)
3. Memories (writer)
1. News
Today Ill try to cover the first, so let me start with what happened yesterday.
Yesterday, I was watching the late night edition of Austria’s major TV news program (ZIB3, ORF). They had decided to cover the war in Gaza / Israel with a 2 minutes contribution while covering a discussion over the pros and cons of a law, making wearing helmets compulsory on Austrians ski-slopes, with a full five-minute feature. Guess what; I happened to disagree with the ORF´s weighting of what is important information and what is not.
An oligopoly is a market form, where a multitude of consumers meets a selected number of producers (think about the telecommunication market). What we are all used to, is an oligopolistic market for news. In a majority of countries and regions a handful of newspapers, tv -stations and press agencies get to decide on what is important news. So in the end they have control over information. Now “control” sounds a bit harsh. What I am trying to say is that, while there may be more papers and tv-stations around, there is only a handful with that actually choses over what makes it into the news and what doesnt. All the other media merely reproduces. What chance do human rights violations in some remote part of the world have to get to the attention of the American public when the major news networks decide that covering it won’t bring any financial benefits in terms of ratings. So here, just like in an oligopolistic market for goods, where a minority has control (market power) over the price, a minority controls information.
I could go on being worried about the structure of traditional news media, but there is something that can be done about it. Hope is at the horizon. The old players are on the retreat , and new media is taking over,. Online newspapers, blogs and even social networking tools such as twitter are core determinants of the 2009+ news landscape. Print media is gradually fading out as these new concepts are gaining in both audience as well as contributors. While all this is being discussed elsewhere with greater inside, I would like to draw attention to the responsibilities that arise from these structural changes.
Only a week ago, I was at a lecture of David Henderson at the Changing Times Conference. Quoting one of his “clients”, he compared the blogosphere to “a thousand lights” (not an exact quotation here). This is, in my opinion, a great analogy with respect to what we were saying above. Imagine a government wants to block news reports about how they treat minorities of getting into their country. Without much effort they can just block a few major sources writing about it, and by that cut away a huge chunk coverage. The very same holds true in the other direction. Totalitarian regimes see it as one of their key businesse not letting anti-regime reports get out of the country. Their power over information is at the very core of their survival at the helm.
The rest is trivial. It is easy to turn out one light, but not so much a thousand. One of the things I want to reach with my blogs is to be one of these lights, how flickering it may be.
11 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
great post. but what are you going to write about? ;-)
(im a light :) )
hahahha @ samans comment
Hey! Freut mich, dich auch im illustren Blog-Club zu entdecken! Hab auch grad ein neues Blog angefangen (http://www.amhochsitz.at/) und versuche in Schwung zu kommen. Werde dich mal gespannt weiterverfolgen!
Lg aus dem 2ten,
Ronni
satellite tv for pc
_________________
satellite tv for pc
I’m looking for a 750GB 7200RPM hard drive for my Dell Vostro 1520. The 250GB I have only runs in Safe Mode because of a virus I can’t remove. I want an external hard drive so I can take the 750GB and put it in my laptop, install Windows on it and then put my 250GB into the external enclosure and copy all my files to the 750GB. What is the cheapest one to get?
_________________
wow guide
Hi, Ok I have a dell laptop inspiron E1505, I really need help with this malware or whatever it is ! I didn’t have a good virus protection, and at the time of infection a prompt kept coming up something like you can delete this virus but you may lose files, damage your computer or it may not restart! I got frustrated seeing the same thing, so instead of downloading a better virus protector I press yes and my computer shut down on me. It restarted, and then I got the virus protector like a dummy. But now Im getting prompts that say, “___dllc:/windows/system32/lasbemo.dll file image does not exists check this against you diskette!! its a buch off different ones. Im lost, Im not good with computer’s if your gonna help I need A LOT of detail. Thanks =)
_________________
wow guide
My laptop got repaired and restored to factory settings from having a virus and now the headphones port isn’t working. I plug in the earphones but the sound still comes through the speakers. How do I fix it? Running Windows Vista
_________________
forex robot
the software you are installingfor this hardware ACPI uniprocessor PC has not not passed the window logo testing to verify its compatibility windows XP continuing your installation of this software may impair or destabilize the correct operation of your system ether immediately or in the future. Microsoft strongly recommends that you stop this installation now and contact the hardware vendor for software that has passed the windows logo testing thats what it tells me i started to do system restore when my P.C started crashing like a week ago and this is the 2nd time i do system restore today cause my P.C crashes .. can any one help me out what do i have to do or download anything ? i have norton 05′ scanned my system for virus and notting pops up i really need help can some one help me out please ????????????
_____________
cheap xbox 360 games
i have a problem with my internal HDD. When this all happened, i was playing a game online. I got a Virus Worm and i shut down my computer and reformatted my HDD and put windows back on. I had a secondary HDD in for back-up purposes. so got windows in and put everything back, but i then noticed that my computers performance went down drastically with my main HDD, I could not copy anything i had onto the back-up drive and once i did it was so slow to copy the file. Once i had all the files on the back-up drive, i decided to start from the back-up drive with windows. Same applied. It was really slow with the reading-and-writing. i decided to take the secondary back-up drive out and boot from the main HDD. Everything seemed to be running smoothly i checked the main HDD Temperature with HD tune. The drives temp was 37 degrees Celsius, and the drive went to normal temperature of 43-44 degrees Celsius. I then decided to plug in the secondary HDD and leave it on for a day. the temperature went from 43-44 degrees to 47-48 degrees Celsius. So my guess is that the HDD drives are getting way to hot, and i am getting what seems like bad sectors in the drive, but it has never done this before. I have always had my back-up drive in ever since i got my main HDD. I can’t place my finger on what is wrong with my drives. Once the main HDD is lower temperatures the drive seems to be performing better. but its normal temperature is 43-44 degrees Celsius and i still have some problems with reading and writing then. Can someone tell me what has happened please. I dont know if it was from the worm virus or if the temperatures are getting too hot (but has never done this before) can someone tell me what to do. I have changed the line leading into the motherboard as well, and that seems to have no effect. i even swapped the board lines between the CD drives and the HDD drives, no effect on that either. can someone tell me what is going on, i have ran out of options.
_____________
cheap xbox 360 games
Salutations from an amazed reader. Now, there have been many writings which I have pondered over today yet none of them comes close to this. Congratulations! And I’ll have you be aware that my friends consider me intensely critical so that is high praise indeed.