Citizen Journalism

Anybody can have a blog. Anybody can read a blog. But, whatever criterion you use, the blogger has more power than the reader.

This will change.

A liberation movement is afoot that demands a new balance of power between author and reader. The readers are ganging up on the bloggers. We bloggers will have to unite to fight back.

Once authors concerned themselves with matters other than putting words together, they stepped onto a slippery slope. Willa Cather started it all when she wanted to know how her novels were typeset. Marshall McLuhan picked this up and told us about the inter-connection between the message and the medium. He also made it clear which side he was on when he sided with readers against authors by suggesting it was usually good enough to read only the left page – one could usually guess what was written on the right page. (This was not entirely a joke.)

And now authors are being dragooned into becoming the servants of online communities. There, readers exercise their democratic right to impose new characters on them, and new plot twists. Happy endings are obligatory.

And who knows what the rise of the cell phone novel will do to the balance of power? It was born in Japan about 2003. By 2007, five of the top ten best-selling novels in Japan were cell-phone novels. They have spread to China and Korea. There is also an English-language cell-phone novel website, www.textnovel.com. The number of cell phone users may be as many as sixty percent of the world’s population.

So far the cell-phone is only a method of distribution for the novel. But the balance of power will shift as soon as novel consumers form a lobby and demand the right to participate in the creative process. They may succeed in the way that, in some places, commercial television news has permitted a secondary element, namely entertainment, to subvert the primary purpose of news, which is to inform the public. Consumers have achieved this without bothering to form a single lobby.

Amazon’s Kindle and its competitors can have a built-in TTS-feature (text to speech) designed to turn an e-book into an audio book. This is designed to be useful of people with bad – or no – eyesight and is, of course, a neutral bystander in the power struggle between author and reader. This cannot be said for efforts that experiment with substituting computers for authors altogether. A great deal of literary creativity will be required to figure out what instructions to give the computer. No doubt sooner or later readers’ committees will be given the job.

This is by no means far-fetched. Focus-groups already largely determine what we see on television and no doubt mass-market publishers have developed similar techniques. To anticipate the future all one has to do is look at the present.

Citizen journalism will soon lead to citizen dentistry.