Rich media - poor democracy

Remember this concept: Vertical integration. It's used in business to mean that a company owns a complete value chain. This means the primary source of information (the source people want to trust) has it's own interest tied to copyright law, entertainment, various political issues etc.

Past and present

The image of modern media many people which to have is that it's an independent force monitoring our goverment. Today this is far from true and I encourage you to read Rich Media, Poor Democracy. Media has it's own agenda and if we accept media as our primary information source our actions become highly dependent and influenced of the interests of media business. In addition, I've observed that todays news hardly get any fact right any more even for simple news, so information quality is at best mediocre.

So the idéa of somebody independent helping us like we imagine there was in the past has no realisation in todays world. Here's another thing to think about: modern news papers subscription cost equals the cost to distribute it. So somebody else have to pay for the information. What do you think they want in return?

Responsibillity

In order to be responsible for ones action (which I happen to think is a positive ideal and a human duty) one have to have facts to act upon. If facts are fictious or wrong, how can we be held responsible?

If we know our primary source of facts are highly biased we therefore have the responsibillity to seek our own facts and truth in order to live responsible.

One way to to this is not to wait for media to give information to you - go out and find out for your self.

The internet may be messy, but its your best chance of getting your freedom of information and hence freedom of choice - the fundament of responsible action - back.