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Monday, July 02, 2007

What is what

"Just as the Internet has accelerated most incarnations of what we mean by the word “information,” so it has sped up what we mean when we employ the very term “encyclopedia.” For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia’s notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven’t even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information."
NYTimes

This is another example of how the Internet flattens and mixes the various compartments in which we used to divide life.
Encyclopedia becomes Wikipedia and mixes with News.
News are not just what happened but what is happening and what will happen.
They include world news and local gossip, a terroristic attack in London and the queue for buying an iPhone.
It is no more what's important, what the journalist thought important, it is what people want to see and hear.
It is what happens, not what is relevant to know.
In a few words, it is what makes audience and, of course, what makes cash...

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