Leigh Rainie of PEW has interesting presentation on the 9 tribes of the internet, but she makes an assumption I have a hard time agreeing with. In her then and now comparison, she notes that information which used to be expensive is now cheap. This is a flawed and dangerous assumption (in an otherwise good analysis).
Reliable information is often very expensive and I think that is one reasons we are having a financial crisis in the journalism industry. For example, while we were able to watch a lot of stuff in real time with Iran and Twitter, assessing the reliability of that info was quite a bit more involved. We still looked to trusted sources, often associated with either traditional media outlets or organizations, to determine what was accurate. Few reliable sources were operating on a shoe string, and some kind of costly infrastructure was behind the filtering of bad from good. Even then it wasn't perfect.
While it might not cost a lot for us to Google, the research itself is no less expensive. How much did it cost PEW to research this presentation? I imagine it was _not_ cheap.
Information is not cheap, but distribution is, which is why Google is so rich. They make their money off the work of others. They don't actually create any information that I know of, but just distribute it and charge people for ads while doing it.
Post new comment