Wherein I continue to talk about the death of ‘old’ media.
Doktor Sleepless took a turn at the beginning of the current arc toward a focus on bloggers. In between the jokes about sex blogging and the usual carnage, there’s a good bit of incisive commentary on the future of blogging, journalism, media, and technology.
But the real interesting stuff is often in the backmatter. This is true for many of the comics that include backmatter–essays from the creators on subjects that may or may not relate to the subject of the comic. Possibly because comics writers and artists are smarter and more interesting than the average bear, or maybe they’re all completely insane. Either way, Doktor Sleepless is just one of the books out there that is worth the cover price for the essay in the back.
This week, in Doktor Sleepless #11, Ellis wrote:
The five rules of journalism–who, what, where, when and why–aren’t there because people like pissing you off with rules. They’re there because that’s how you learn things and that’s how you explain things and that, eventually, is how you see that events and people are connected–as connected as people with laptops trapped by bomb blasts, as connected as stoned gunmen with mobile phones, as connected as rioters with blogs–and that’s how we build up a picture of the world and begin to understand where we are today and what it really looks like.
Ellis is talking about the new media–the Web, specifically blogs and Twitter–killing newspapers. And how blogging quite simply doesn’t replace actual journalism. Most blogs are simply re-posting news stories from actual news outlets and providing commentary, not digging up new sources or breaking news stories.
There are exceptions to this, and breaking news occasionally rolls off Twitter, especially. I got the news that Obama had been elected president not from the NBC broadcast in the office where I was, but from refreshing Twitter and reading the Twitter feed of a woman in Florida who had local numbers in front of her.
Doktor Sleepless the comic paints a rather bleak but oddly beautiful picture of a world gone mad for tech, but the essays in the back give us commentary on the world we’re in right now. The combination of the two…well, you should be reading it.
