When Did the "News" Become the "Olds?"

Increasingly, we see the "mainstream media"  retreating and retrenching to their old worldview -- with themselves singularly at the top of the information pyramid and hierarchy, rather than seizing the leadership in the greatly expanded brave and bold new world -- in circling the wagons ever tighter, and even building moats against the continuing encroachements against their hegemony -- as the only people "fit" to tell us, "What in the world is going on?" -- in an era when the information makers can speak for themselves, and often do, because they can say it better, with real understanding of what they mean.

That's always been a problem for the intermediaries of any time and place -- when everybody becomes the principals and no longer feel a need for those to translate and interpret "specialzied jargon," for the now possible and preferred universal language -- that doesn't create the enclaves, bureaucracies and hierarchies.  Where is their place in such a world -- when everyone who wants to, beocmes a journalist -- despite the protestations that they can't be?  but then, it can also be pointed out, that they can't be Everyman too -- if they insist on their "special rights" not to be like everybody else.  One can't have it both ways -- in the old worldview.

But in the new, one can play all the roles and functtions -- as best they can, until they run into the few with vastly greater knowledge and expertise than they can acquire -- as the undoubted prodigies of that field.  But not everybody is -- despite their attempts to form assoications that recognize them as exclusively such.  That manner of deference began to decline in the medieval ages and the trade guilds that defined one definitively for life -- as the only way they could be.  But now we hope in the new age and era, people can be everything they want to be -- in the broadest sense of that meaning -- to be their own computer expert, health  and lifestyle expert -- without having to hire those who claim that exclusive turf for themselves -- as the way it always has been, even if they just made it up yesterday.

But merely hoping for a return to the good ol' days, never made it happen -- as glorious as the Pony Express and Wells Fargo stagecoach once were.  Progress never goes backwards, even if one calls themselves the "progressives" and "liberal"  in desiring the return to the days before their passing.

Everybody has to take it to the "next level" -- and not just remain the leaders in the old memories of how things used to be and should remain forevermore -- in the unchanging world of the town newspaper, schools and post office, as the exclusive gateway to the world of information and participation in the greatest life of these times.