One anecdote for you; There is a local news outlet in my city that has a vibrant heavily moderated forum for guided political discussion, and they occasionally extract forum posts for publication on their main website. They excerpted a part of one of my posts, edited it and made my words say something I did not intend, and in a way I didn't actually believe in. I was pretty upset with that. I had a flurry of e-mail exchanges with the editor in charge, and I eventually realized that the forum posters were just being used by yet another media machine as tools to get better ratings. No different I would guess from "letters to the editor" being manipulated. So, in my experience, it is refreshing to have a vehicle for expressing oneself where there is enough moderation to keep the garbage posting out, but no editing or unwarranted censorship or manipulation of content.
Another difference would be in velocity and temporal relevance. If you take a vacation for a week and come back here, the hot topics have mostly changed and people have moved on to discuss new things. Or, when something newsworthy happens in the world a discussion begins almost immediatly following the event. Sometimes too soon, before all the "facts" are exposed, but there are still good discussions based on people's gut instincts or guesses on what those facts might be. It is interesting to see who makes the best guesses, and who misses the mark. I guess Internet news outlets, or daily newspapers would be the second closest print source in speed, however, a CMC is very different from those.
If you look at the continuum of publishing from books, to magazines, to newspapers, to news websites, to CMC I think their is a correlation between time to press, freedom of expression, editing, and acceptable quality. So, in a way, even though there is a cacaphony of noise, the internet has become a liberation from corporate media censorship of the voices of the common people. I think this need for self expression fuels the popularity of CMC's, and blogs. The next Patrick Henry will just be a very popular blogger.
This place, the Lounge, feels more like the town square, where most anyone can come along and engage in the conversation. Yeah, it's a gaming site, but then again, who isn't a gamer? :) If they aren't, then they don't have much in common with us. So I guess the Lounge is more the town square you can only get to by walking though the arcade.
Another difference would be in velocity and temporal relevance. If you take a vacation for a week and come back here, the hot topics have mostly changed and people have moved on to discuss new things. Or, when something newsworthy happens in the world a discussion begins almost immediatly following the event. Sometimes too soon, before all the "facts" are exposed, but there are still good discussions based on people's gut instincts or guesses on what those facts might be. It is interesting to see who makes the best guesses, and who misses the mark. I guess Internet news outlets, or daily newspapers would be the second closest print source in speed, however, a CMC is very different from those.
If you look at the continuum of publishing from books, to magazines, to newspapers, to news websites, to CMC I think their is a correlation between time to press, freedom of expression, editing, and acceptable quality. So, in a way, even though there is a cacaphony of noise, the internet has become a liberation from corporate media censorship of the voices of the common people. I think this need for self expression fuels the popularity of CMC's, and blogs. The next Patrick Henry will just be a very popular blogger.
This place, the Lounge, feels more like the town square, where most anyone can come along and engage in the conversation. Yeah, it's a gaming site, but then again, who isn't a gamer? :) If they aren't, then they don't have much in common with us. So I guess the Lounge is more the town square you can only get to by walking though the arcade.
”There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio.
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