'Reporters are everywhere'

If we turn into a society where, as Earl Mardle says at A Networked World, 80 percent of the population has a blog, will we wind up with a Big Brother culture where we can't pick our nose in our car for fear of being humiliated on someone's weblog? Or will the positive aspects of a more transparent society outweigh the Big Brother negatives?

As the privacy backlash grows -- as it surely will in a society where those who don't have blogs still will have camera phones and friends with blogs -- what sort of new standards of law or etiquette will arise?

Lots of questions. Not many answers yet.

A thought drawn on my own experience living in a town, Benicia, Calif., where GetLocalNews.com, my employer, has operated a community news web site for five years:

My knowledge that BeniciaNews.com enables anyone to post comments (which has been possible almost since our launch) or articles (for more than two years) has affected my behavior at least in small ways.

Having seen comments on the message board about people's driving habits, I am more cautious when I'm behind the wheel. The possibility of being ticketed, getting in an accident or injuring myself or others already were deterrents to speeding or rolling through the new stop signs that seem sprout weekly. Living in Benicia, the possibility that someone might rate my driving in a message board is yet one more reason to drive carefully. At least til I get out of town, where citizen journalists are few and far between (for now). Just kidding. Really, officer.

Mardle's post ties together Judith Miller, shield laws, the Downing Street Memo and the future of citizen media:

I've been watching the growth of Citizen Media for a year now and it seems to me that it is just hitting its straps and if it keeps up this way, there will be no great need to protect journalists because, when 80% of the population has a blog as a matter of course, and just naturally wants to talk about things they do and see and, dammit, gets the idea that they can ask questions and publish the answers, that bright line between "the public" and "the professional" will fade quickly away.

When every miscreant and/or politician realises that "reporters" are everywhere, listening to, recording, and distributing everything they say, and taking photos of it as well, their ability to corner, embargo, tie down, leak and generally manipulate the media will go away fast. Read the rest