The Reformation

Jay Rosen published a fantastic piece on his blog today (which you can find here), describing how the landscape of journalism has fundamentally changed. He uses the metaphor of migration, describing old-media types as "reluctant migrants" who must leave their familiar terrain for a strange, new land. Rosen sounds the death knell for the traditional, top-down, "one-to-many" news model and describes a new way:

Across the digital divide the conditions for doing journalism are quite different. I’ll give you the highlights. Communication is two-way, and many-to-many. Horizontal sharing is as important as top-down messaging. Readers have become writers and the people formerly known as the audience are flourishing as content producers, expert sharers and self-guided consumers.

I've been tossing around another metaphor in my head for what's going on here. Could this be a Reformation? An Information Reformation?

Back in the 16th century, people of faith got sick of the Roman Catholic Church making all the rules, restricting who had access to Scripture, claiming people needed an intermediary (e.g., the pope) to have a relationship with God. All this while selling indulgences and engaging in myriad other acts of corruption and silliness. Wait a minute, people said (Martin Luther notably among them). Can't we just talk to God ourselves? Can't we share information among ourselves? Can't we read the Bible ourselves instead of allowing it to be filtered by people who obviously have a self-interest in what they preach? Thus, the Protestant Reformation. One-way, one-to-many communication became two-way, many-to-many communication.

So maybe we're witnessing another Reformation of sorts. The Internet Reformation. Just a thought.