The Digital Democracy’s Emerging Elites

THE DIGITAL DEMOCRACY'S EMERGING ELITES
[SOURCE: Financial Times, AUTHOR: John Gapper]
[Commntary] Old media “gatekeepers” are out of fashion and what Jay Adelson, chief executive of Digg, calls “collective wisdom” is in. As Rupert Murdoch said last year of young Internet users: “They don't want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important...They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it.” But such democratic rhetoric (what one critic has dubbed “digital Maoism”) ignores one awkward fact. While anyone is free to launch a blog, contribute to Wikipedia or publish photographs on Flickr, a relatively small number of activists often dominate proceedings on Web 2.0 sites. Although they are unpaid, they can nonetheless achieve an elite status reminiscent of the old media’s professional gatekeepers. The fact that there is an “A-list” of bloggers who garner a large proportion of Internet links and traffic indicates that just because the web is an open medium it is not necessarily an egalitarian one. This generation of consumers has learnt to be skeptical about how information and entertainment is edited and filtered by groups of professionals. It ought to remain on its guard in the Web 2.0 world as well.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b75779ae-4bf0-11db-90d2-0000779e2340.html
(requires subscription)