Deep down, what makes the new kind of debate from the Huffington Post, Slate, and Yahoo! actually really exciting is the extent to which it represents the third component of networked news.
What, again, is the third component of networked news? It’s a data-driven network of the people and the issues in the news.
Although very limited in scale, this example of being able to slice and dice a stodgy debate is amazingly powerful. Jarvis knows it. He groks how this means a “conversation”—a free-flowing exchange of information among people along a topic or around some substance of interest to everyone involved, both the speakers or writers and the listeners or readers. As I’ve noted before, I think Jarvis also, at some level, gets the importance of structuring the news around the people who are in it and who consume it and interact with it.
That’s what this is. Once the candidates have had their chances, we listeners get to pull apart their interviews, re-arrange them, and piece together a conversation, organized by issue. We can ignore candidates and focus on others. We can focus on Iraq, or maybe even withdrawal from Iraq, or we can weave in and out of interrelated topics, like, say, security and civil rights or single-payer health care and taxes, comparing each candidate’s self-consistency and comparing them all to one another. (I’m for security and civil rights and single-payer health care and taxes.)
This is awesome. Huffington Post is blowing up. For realz.
To bring in the first two components of networked news, HuffPo and co would have to give us the tools to weave in our own video clips and then let us share them with one another as variously trusting members of a community.
Let me juxtapose my own counterarguments to a windbag’s dissembling. Or let me loose some praise on another candidate’s courage. For that matter, let me juxatpose my praise for a candidate’s courage with another citizen’s attack on that same candidate’s cowardice. Let us argue with one another—and do it alongside the evidence.
And then let us, users and consumers, mixers and contributors, define relationships among one another. Let us grow our relationships. Let me read some smart midwesterner’s opinions on farm subsidies and then let me subscribe only to his agriculture-related content. Or let me take a wide-angle view of the network of conversations we citizens are having. Let me find out how many people really care about extraterritorial rendition, or let me get a sense of who wants big government to let them be. Let me check out which clips are the most viewed or most mashed-up.
That would be awesome.
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