dharmasphere » The Future Of Art & Media

I just came across OurMedia and their mission (via this news source)

That “news source” was me. What a fascinating trackback to receive. I’d never considered myself to be a news source at all. In fact I emailed Prem, the author of the post at dharmasphere about it and he responded promptly (and I mean promptly - like 5 minutes later):

We’re all news sources these days!

Wow. That was an eye-opening, paradigm-shifting statement for me.

I’ve been following Dan Gillmor’s work on grassroots, citizen-generated, community-centered journalism with great interest and pretty much complete buy-in. I agree with the fairly popular sentiment that grassroots media is on the rise and with Dan’s position that the mainstream media still has its place and that it’s not going anywhere and that we shouldn’t want it to…that the role of the current media sources is changing and that those MSM outlets that adapt will still be relevant and valuable.

No matter how much I admire and agree with the work that Dan’s doing, however, I never thought of myself as having any role as any kind of news source. Never, that is, until Prem pointed it out to me in such plain terms.

Really paradigm-shifting.

This experience reinforced a phrase that I’ve heard repeatedly as I’ve listened to the Gillmor Gang from last August about Attention.xml multiple times in my effort to grok Attention. Doc Searls comments about those who author us, a concept that I had heard before, I believe in undergraduate psychology classes. It seems to me that part of the power of citizen media is that we have a much wider range of people who might author us, that those authors are more like us, and that we are able to choose those authors.

Something in these factors is also part of what I am growing to believe could make Attention.xml one of the more important developments in consumption of citizen media and of the web as a whole. But I need to cogitate on that a little more.