It's odd how my mindset has moved in the last year. I used to be an avid consumer of mainstream media. When I was a small child I would trust the mainstream media. The measured tones of serious newsreaders on radio and television, the sombre black ink of the front page stories, the authoritative background information of Time or Newsweek. Oh, call me naive, I know, it's a bit like going to church as a child and thinking it was all serious grown up business. For a while longer you can suspend disbelief, but we all grow out of childish beliefs eventually.
Someone told me that any time you saw an item in the media of which you had some inside knowledge, they got it wrong. And that meant, when you thought about it, that there must be people who had inside knowledge about every item on the news, and all the news must be wrong. And then I saw something I knew about, can't remember now whether it was an interview I had once with a reporter and been misquoted, or a demonstration I had been to which was misrepresented, or a piece of research I was familiar with which had been completely misunderstood. Whatever, the scales were peeled away from my eyes.
So as a young adult, I began to refuse to suspend disbelief in what the media was telling me about, say, Vietnam, and that led to shouting at the innocent radio, throwing slippers at the television (careful not to break the screen before, say, 'Laugh In' came on), hurling barely read newspapers and magazines into the trash can of history. Enormous frustration as they were telling me things I either knew, or suspected, were not true, and they kept right on doing it in spite of my impotent rage.
Oh, I learnt to write the occasional 'Letter to the Editor', but they rarely got published, and even when they did, they appeared days after the item that had made me mad, and I was now angry about some other outrage. And in the meantime the mainstream media kept moving further and further to the Right, and its reporting became more and more inaccurate.
But then I discovered blogs, and my world changed. Suddenly when something annoyed me, or I thought it was wrong, I could respond instantly, debate the blogger, or comment on the news item, in real time, debate an issue with fellow posters in a thread. Suddenly people with values and ideas like mine need not be just passive receivers of distorted world views and news, but could interact with it, try to change it, correct it, give it a context, show an alternative interpretation.
So now when I visit a web site that doesn't have a facility for reader responses, like, say the BBC site, or 'Common Dreams', I feel strangely deprived, as if I have lost my voice, or my fingers. I am again that teenager getting angry, a rebel without a pen, and I wonder how long before all internet news sites, and all news outlets, will enable full reader involvement or lose their readers.
Bet your sweet bippy it won't be long.