This is another commentary that I wrote for my News and Religion course:

I remember those early days of blogging when we thought we would change the world. We compared the Internet to Gutenberg’s printing press and wondered what it would do to literature, politics, religion, and society. What would it be like to live in a truly egalitarian society where everyone owned their own printing press?

We were mostly optimistic, although even then there were some concerns. How would you determine truth and authority? What economic models would support news gathering and investigative reporting?

In 2004, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson released EPIC, an eight minute video that explored the impact of digital technology on the news media. It was based on a presentation they had done for the Poynter Institute, and while the specific events it described did not end up happening, the conclusion seems frightening prescient.

EPIC allows us to mix and match their choices however we like. At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world - deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before, but at its worst and for too many EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational, but EPIC is what we wanted.

Too many of us failed to consider the importance of the audience developing media literacy that kept pace with changes in media.

We did struggle with other issues. If everyone had their own blog, was their own publisher, what did this say about professionalism in the emerging media? Many of us would not be professional in the sense that it was our primary source of income. What standards and ethics would or should apply to bloggers?

2014 did not see the New York Times go offline as Sloan warned could happen, but it did see a court decision protecting bloggers against libel suits. In a commentary by Ken Paulson of the First Amendment Center, he writes

“The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist,” Judge Andrew Hurwitz wrote.

While the Supreme Court has previously observed that the lines between traditional news media and native web content have become blurred, this makes the first time that federal appellate court has essentially said that journalists and bloggers are one and the same when it comes to the First Amendment.

Again, we see our understanding of media evolve, and the audience needs to keep up.

The issues that this ‘new media’, as many of us called it a decade ago, and as some still refer to it today, also includes the financial aspects. We see this in the news today as a Billionaire Owner Shuts Down DNAinfo, Gothamist Sites A Week After Workers Unionize. This goes one step beyond what is happening at Digital First Media, whom The Street describes as “the biggest cost cutter in the newspaper industry” when their CEO stepped down recently.

Beyond the legal and financial issues, we have the issue of “truthiness” as Stephen Colbert described it, or an epistemic crisis, as David Roberts writes in Vox.

The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.

It is worth noting that conservatives on Facebook were quick to assert that this epistemic breach is fueled as much by news organizations they consider liberal as it is by very conservative news organizations they embrace, despite the research from Harvard. To further the epistemic breach, they go on to dismiss the research coming out of Harvard as not being trustworthy because it comes from a liberal university. This only serves to further illustrate the issues of the epistemic breach.

Perhaps more than issues of the legal rights of bloggers or the financial structures to support news gathering and investigative reporting is this issue of who we trust and how we come to know things. No matter how fair, objective, accurate, or unbiased any reporting is, if the audience chooses not to believe it, the reporting is ineffective.

All of this leads to the question of how we understand media literacy in a rapidly evolving media landscape. Keith Hamon offers a fascinating exploration of this in his blog post, Reading the "MeToo" Text as Hyperobject

I’m suggesting here that online texts—the billions of text messages, tweets, and Facebook messages, the currently dominant streams among countless others—function as a hyperobject, as Timothy Morton calls it, or a rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari), or noise (Michel Serres), or silence (Paul Goodman and the Buddhists). Approaching those texts from the perspective of hyperobjects may just help me engage them better.

As we move from a society whose news media has been broadcast oriented, distributed through television, radio, and newsprint, to a society whose news media is collaborative and digital, as we move from a modernist perspective to a postmodernist perspective, all of us must become literate in digital media and the hyperobjects that people like Keith Hamon are writing about.

Robin Sloan starts off EPIC with a quote from Charles Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Perhaps we were right in those early days of blogging. We are changing the world. Now, we are in a liminal time where our media has changed but the audience has not yet caught up. If our words are to have meaning the audience needs to become more literate in the media used.