Resisting will not halt the change

With the introduction of Google’s  ‘Fast Flip’, the debate over the validity of news aggregating service resurfaced in vitriolic  name calling. This time, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Thomson suggests that some of the news aggregating services available on internet are ‘parasites’ or ‘tapeworm’ (see below extract from the BBC news).

"There is a collective consciousness among content creators that they are bearing the costs and that others are reaping some of the revenues.”

"There is no doubt that certain websites are best described as parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the internet"

Such denial of the changing business environment, fuelled by personalization, connectivity and systems thinking is not going to benefit the ‘traditional’ news companies. Have we not learnt the lessons from early days of the music industry when it was faced with the inevitable digital age? The news of Facebook’s success clearly highlights the changes in the patterns of consuming information. We, the users are all actively engage in the information distribution in our own personalized way that the  emergence of such news aggregating services was inevitable. Instead of dismissing such services, the traditional news companies should embrace and adopt a business model that can exploit the changing market. Business needs to reread the history books on  changing technology and its implications.

Social technologies, tools for ‘EVERYONE’

Bill Thompson in his BBC article argues, quite rightly that “The next British General Election will almost certainly be called the first "real" internet election…” As we have already witnessed political usage of internet and social technologies in the US election, it is predictable that we can expect the same, if not more from our forthcoming general election.

Social technologies are perceived as tools for ‘Everyone’ to actively engage in content creation and dissemination. By facilitating and enabling users to have a voice and provide ways to share their views across time and space, consequently it has challenged the status quo, offering some innovative and alternative world views (positive and negative). The early days of social technology usage, when we said, ‘Everyone’, we were largely referring to users who were not professional photographers, journalists, commentators, programme makers etc. The internet and social technologies have helped to publish alternative political viewpoints that were not filtered through economic decision led editorials.

Now it is really for ‘EVERYONE’ (that is connected to social network) which also includes politicians. Social technologies are going to be one of many tools that politicians will fully exploit in their election campaign and the social network sites will be filled with their slogans along with the diverse and innovative thinking that are generated by general users. What we have to be wary of in the social network world is that, the masters of manipulation of public opinion are also becoming the masters of social technologies.

Understanding the Elephant

I just read through ‘J. Kirk and M. L. Miller(1986) Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research’, Sage.

Any researcher would have come across the story of ‘the blind men and the elephant’. I thought these two paragraphs below succinctly explains the characteristics and the issues of quantitative research approach when studying social phenomena.

“The familiar parable of the blind men and the elephant illustrates the problem of reliability. According to that story, several blind men encountered an elephant, investigated its various parts, and quarrelled over their mutually irreconcilable reports.

The thesis/punch line, or chiste, of the parable is not to poke fun at the visually impaired but to dramatize the imperfection of the various epistemic positions that can be taken with regard to such stories. A vulgar positivist might be imagined to take some sort of statistical average of the data (“compensating for error in measurement”), and conclude that the elephant is a formless blob covered with elephant skin” (P49).

However, now the problem is as a qualitative researcher, how we can produce the understanding of the Elephant which is objective (used in the qualitative research sense), reliable and valid.