Rumour Rules

The development of Networked Media Environments allows the interconnection and networking of people and ideas, a cross-fertilisation between those from diverse cultures and with diverse knowledge. This can lead in two very different directions:
• towards an increasingly undifferentiated experience, where knowledge is replaced by snippets of information separated from their source, where rumour rules. Mary Flanagan
or
• to a more active participation in making meaning, understanding where ideas come from and where they may lead us. In other words to a less canonical authorship and a more responsible audience / readership.

The existence of distributed network media challenges existing top down, hierarchical power structures such as national governments and corporations by allowing knowledge and data to cross existing national and political borders where it was previously carefully controlled.
• This flow of information has implications for border control and immigration - http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/borderxing/
• it undermines authoritative government sources of information - http://www.usdept-arttech.net/
• it provides a high profile public platform for publishing grievance - http://www.bhopal.net/
• it highlights global inequalities - link to follow
Networked media environments are blurring long established boundaries between general readers/consumers of media and creators/authors
• Wikipedia Creators Move Into News
• Citizen journalism launched this month, by Wikipedia…
• Wikinews will present original material rather than just compiling and summarizing information found elsewhere,
"Our mission is to create a world where citizen journalists report the news on a wide variety of current events" says the main page of Wikinews.
http://www.editorsweblog.org/2004/11/wikipedia_creat.html 30.11.04
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65819,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
• The one voice of old media is being replaced by the many voices of public perspective
• A rise in subjective street level news, more free of the agendas of global news media monopolies
http://moport.org , http://www.indymedia.org.uk/
• The speed of Internet has increased the speed and spread of news – ‘as it happens’ and ‘across the globe’