Some time ago, I mentally reformulated the journalism industry as an information processing engine which ferrets out and then publicizes secrets -- any secrets -- for advertising revenue. Your secrets: our clickthrough bucks.
While this was pointed at government corruption, this had some kind of utility. When it was used to find a neglected neighborhood bistro of thirty years that was going under due to the loss of foot traffic, this was laudable.
Now it seems as if any sort of secret at all is fair game, and the more you want to hide something the more they want at it, whether or not it is of value, privacy be damned. Right now, these secrets are hunted, devoured, and excreted for the howling Twitter mob to fixate on in a permanent hurricane of outrage, bashing its way up and down the coast, as a result of the temperature of the Internet climbing up, and it has been incredibly convenient for these journos to at least try to guide the storm to whatever targets they've had their eye on in the long march through the institutions, but the collateral damage is immense. We're seeing it here.
While this was pointed at government corruption, this had some kind of utility. When it was used to find a neglected neighborhood bistro of thirty years that was going under due to the loss of foot traffic, this was laudable.
Now it seems as if any sort of secret at all is fair game, and the more you want to hide something the more they want at it, whether or not it is of value, privacy be damned. Right now, these secrets are hunted, devoured, and excreted for the howling Twitter mob to fixate on in a permanent hurricane of outrage, bashing its way up and down the coast, as a result of the temperature of the Internet climbing up, and it has been incredibly convenient for these journos to at least try to guide the storm to whatever targets they've had their eye on in the long march through the institutions, but the collateral damage is immense. We're seeing it here.