Arianna Huffington, founder and owner of The Huffington Post, talks about something at the Guardian's Activate 09 conference so many others have talked about before: how the Internet is changing society.
However, Huffington somehow manages to bring new ideals of this commonly regurgitated topic to the table.
One of her examples of how the web can change society did not rotate around the medium itself, but the use of it. According to theguardian, Huffington said that "the greatest thing internet users can bring to the world is our obsessiveness."
This notion mildly supports one of my previous blog posts, which discussed how a career based off of YouTube can be equal to more stressful and busying than a normal market job. This is because the founders of a website have to work up to its speed, providing information to its readers as fast as its readers can access information.
Huffington also talks about how investigative journalists and bloggers will probably get more publicity by using the internet in the first place, but if they don't follow up with their work by leading readers through their investigative process as they go, they will lose publicity and risk a chance for change. The example for this notion was illustrated through investigative journalist and founder of the Talking Points Memo blog, John Marshall, who rigorously covered the firing of government attorneys by the Bush administration.
"If Josh Marshall had disappeared for six months and then wrote a blockbuster piece, maybe nothing would have happened."
On that note, its really not the medium at all. It's the use of it. Just like before Internet, newspapers were the best form of information, not because there wasn't anything better, but because society didn't want there to be.
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