Stephany Sandler, the professor, caught my attention to her class when she described: “Our course studies Russia’s rebels, deviants, martyrs, loners, and losers as emblems of national identity”.

It has been a blast. I Just read “The Time: Night”, of Ludmila Petrushevskaya. And today we are going to review the work of Dmitrii Prigov.

Just for you to get a sense of what I am talking about, read this poem, translated by Philip Metres. I found it in a blog

In Japan I would be Catullus
And in Rome I would be Hokusai
And in Russia I am the same guy
Who would have been
Catallus in Japan
And in Rome, Hokusai.

So good, ist’n it?

There is a huge concern in the industry and among journalists about what is it going to happen to journalism. The range of concern varies from the lost of job posts, to the disappearance of the Newspapers, to the vanishing of accountability journalism.

From every corner, thinkers and experts are proposing solutions to the problem: from teaching kids the love for journalism, to make the readers pay for content in the web. Just last week, Clay Shirky engage in an interesting debate with Steven Brill about the question: Will people pay for content online?

I think we, the people in the mass media industry, are missing the point. Totally. We are facing the emerging of new technologies like the only thing we need to do is to learn how to use them and the copy and paste our old business in the web, when in fact something much more radical is happening out there. I think we should be changing the paradigms about journalism. We need to pay a closer attention to the open source ideology.

The digital revolution is not just creating new ways to communicate. It is also establishing new ways to think and new ways to create.

One lesson I deducted from reading Eric S. Raymond is that web is dominated by an audience that refuse to be passive. If we were to apply few of the principles of the open source and the web 2.0 to journalism, I think we would find better answers to our concerns.

For example, let’s take some of the key elements Raymond describes in The Cathedral… : what you built with the cooperation of regular people is better and more realiable than what a lonely genius can do.

“Treating your users as co-developers it’s your least-hussler route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging”.

Replace “code” with “journalistic content” and “debugging” with “fixing error” and there you have it.

Some people would argue that Citizen Journalism have demonstrated that the idea of improving the content with the participation of “users” is a fallacy. I agreed that that experience seemed to have failed. But I think it was not because of the principle applied, but because the way it was done.

As Raymons puts it, for the open source to work well you can’t ask the people to help you built something from scratch. You need to provide the layout. Citizen Journalism failed because it wanted the users to do our work, mostly from scratch.

“It’s fairly clear that one can not code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode (…) Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with”, says Raymond.

I think what media and journalism online should be asking the readers it help us to “test, debug and improve” the content we are planning to develop. If we give the users the right to have an opinion about what we are planning to do, to tell us what news they would like us to report, they might be willing to pay for our salary.

And I also understand that nobody knows what is it going to replace the role the newspapers played, especially in gathering and distributing what we still call “news” and its more sophisticated form, the Investigative Journalism.

Shirky believes that society ought to save Journalism not Newspapers and propose that we need to try different models. Most of them would failed but some would succeed.

A handful of experiments are in place already. From the Mark Cuban model, that propose to fund difficult and long-pieces of journalism throwing through the window the ethical standards journalists are suppose to hold, to the idealistic citizen journalism models that count on the free work and will of good people to get the information out, to the still-to-be-tried-in-the-journalistic field model of the 1,000 True Fans.

I have not doubt that some of that is going to work and that an important group or journalists are going to survive this revolution, but I think the decay of Mass Media (Not just Newspapers. TV channels are based in the same advertising model that is falling apart) is leaving blank a bigger space -a more important one, than just where or how to get the news.

Mass Media, especially newspapers, collect, process and distribute information. But just a service they provide. That’s not what they are. Mass Media are the forum -or should be, the place where social debate happens. It is where a named society sees its identity reflected. It is where a regular citizen finds what’s going on in the life of his or her fellow citizens, what matter -or should matter, to people beyond the limits of their neighborhoods, what music is becoming popular, who are the raising starts, who are the ones falling down. Mass Media is the place -or should be the place, where anybody, without the need to be a geek, can understand the revolution of the digital era. It is where people see the whole picture, not necessarily, not just what they like.

Mass Media, particularly newspapers, promote or  derail change. That’s why they place such a big role during the print revolution. They are  -or should be, the place where people compare themselves to what others are thinking, doing, feeling. It is where the audiences measure themselves in the social scale. It is where people of the past century found what to love, what to reject.

We can argue that the Mass media stopped playing that role at some point, that they got too committed to the status quo, the same way the Catholic Church was tied with Aristocracy previous to the Print Revolution. Possible. The fact is that soon, they are not going to be around. It seems what we will still have some forms of journalism. But my question is: where are we going to find the meaning of being part of a “society”?

Marshall McLuhan said The Media is the Message. I wonder what would he be thinking today.

Rosenberg describes the technicality that made the phenomena possible and how the stream media wrongfully refused to give it credit or authority.

Now, that the industry of mass media, especially newspapers are shaking into a big crisis, the creators of weblogs and the earliest followers of this trend might be smiling. Clay Shirky argues that the mass media and newspapers are falling downhill because they were supported by a business model that worked out only by accident.

But what has happened? Why did so many people around the world decide to spend their time writing personal stories out in the open? Why did the phenomena sparkle so quickly and vastly around the world, even turning upside down governments? According to wikipedia, Iran is the third largest country of bloggers and that fact, amplified by the traditional media, has put a lot of pressure and global attention to the politics of that country.

I think that people have historically looked up the mass media not only for the need of news, but also and maybe most importantly looking for a place where identify themselves and to measure their status in comparison to others. The more democratic the world has become, the more people have had access to mass goods -such as food to put in their plates, but also to TV and satellite channels, the more they have grieved for recognition.

Mass media, on the contrary, with its intend of addressing the “important” issues, have left aside the voice, the faces and the experiences of the mayority of the people they consider their audience. In every country and mayor city of the western world, there is a newspaper that intends to cover “national” or “global” issues. People who have access to those media, often represents the elites of every field. Those few experts, government officials, sport players and show business celebrities are invested in authorities to the rest of their compatriots or, at least, to the audience of such mayor newspapers, radio or tv stations. When do you see regular citizens being interviewed, in other words, recognized? Mostly in natural disasters, crimes, and more currently in reality shows.

So, when the web geeks invented a tool that any grandmother could learn how to use to tell their “important” things, not just to the circles of their relatives and friends, but to people that knew nothing about them before they wrote their blogs, the vast masses of people that had never appeared in a TV show, found the instant satisfaction of being recognized. They realized they do not have to wait for a reporter to knock on their door to ask them The Question they have waited to answer all their lives. They just turn on their computers and type.