Is the lowest common denominator ruining our culture?

The spark for this blog was from the 16 March Newsweek column “The Technologist,” by Steven Levy. The piece is about an upcoming book written by Andrew Keen called “The Cult of the Amateur.”

This link connects to the book's publisher Random House. It's about the central theme of the book and creates an interesting argument.

The marketing tagline is “How today’s Internet killing our culture,” but is that statement true? The author believes that when everyone has a voice the best voices are drowned in a sea of mediocrity and slang.

I take the position of Devil’s Advocate and disagree. As much as I respect grammatical structure in our language and opine for romantic and traditional literary staples, I can’t concede that the Internet’s one person=one voice and everyone-gets-a-chance-philosophy is life-threatening for all other forms of culture. Nor do I agree that all younger generations are blindly promoting this evil conquest of our civilization by creating a new stage on which to express their beliefs. It smacks of elitism to cry fowl in the face of such healthy competition. I believe the cream rises to the top even in the blogging arena.

The only concession I will give to the writer is in the credibility department. The line between truth and entertainment in our media needs to be reinforced. There are far too many holes in that wall but there is a difference between authentic news and creative fiction.

What do you think? Is the lowest common denominator ruining our culture?

Bye-Bye Blogs?

Bye-bye Blogs?
This article titled “Apathy and exhaustion are idling bloggers.” It was written by Jon Telvin from the McClatchy Newspaper group and was in the Feb. 20 issue of the Florida Times-Union.

The topic discussed in the piece is familiar to Mass media students in our class. We all know how difficult it is to consistently post a meaningful blog. It feels like work to write something that is thoughtful and hopefully interesting to read because-IT IS WORK! (Many students in our class fail to blog each week even though our grades depend on it.)

The article provides a statistic that there are already over 200 million ex-bloggers. It also says that traffic on blog based sites like MySpace.com have fallen in recent months.An expert from the piece theorizes that blogging will give way to other “more effective forms of communication.”

I don’t know what that means but communication on the Internet is evolving to include all types of media. There is no screening process to become a blogger and no formal instructions or rules on how to blog.

I believe that informal communication like this will continue and start incorporating live video like several messenger programs currently use. I think that in the future blogs will become personal broadcasting places where anyone can experience the feeling of being a newscaster.

How do you feel about blogging?

Will it continue as a medium of communication?

Will you continue blogging after Mass media class is over? And if so, what will your blog’s focus be?