Economist's New Media survey: Practice what you preach?

In its issue, dated April 20, the Economist published a survey on New Media. As usual, it is content-rich, well-written and thought-provoking. As I am very much interested in topics discussed – blogging, wikis and other forms of participatory medias - and had some personal thoughts about the ongoing revolution, I wanted to react, online of course. This proved quite challenging. There was a section called Offer to Readers, which kindly proposed me to buy reprints, as well as plenty of links to sources of the survey but nothing that would support interactive dialogue. It was probably too much to expect a space for comments and short blogs at the end of the survey but it actually proved quite difficult to even find the e-mail of the author, Andreas Kluth. It took me about ten minutes of search on the site and even then the proposed format of comments, obviously designed by the guy who is charge of all “user-friendly” forms used by the UK government, did not encourage free flow of ideas. I managed to put a sentence that the Economist should eat what they cook and facilitate interaction, when they discuss interactive medias but I am not sure what the response will be.

My other comment was that while the comparison between blogging and invention of movable type by Gutenberg may not far-fetched, it does require further elaboration and should be put in a historical perspective. More specifically, Gutenberg invention led to the rapid destruction of the scribe trade, it took several hundred years and additional inventions for the full-fledge emergence of medias. Not surprisingly, those inventions were economic in nature. I think specifically of the classified ads. They appeared first in XVIIth century and it took another hundred years to stimulate the development of newspapers. Similarly, the emergence of the brand-focused advertising in late XIXth and early XXth centuries led to the surge of mass-medias.
Internet has compressed the time frames and made technological and business innovations quasi-simultaneous. Nevertheless it did not eliminate their interactions and mutual dependence.

I agree that the long-tail (which I discussed some time ago as a “library effect”) is an important phenomenon but wonder whether it does not have limitations. In the new world of medias, everybody can publish and more people are likely to be read but I am not sure how much more. Contrary to widespread perceptions, networks are neither flat nor uniform. They have hierarchies and after a while tend to disproportionately concentrate around few nodes. Paradoxically, the very abundance of links and data is likely to increase concentration, as users are looking for guides and clear paths within the ever increasing labyrinths of views and opinions.