What is WRIPE trying to achieve?
Posted on November 26, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content |
A strange effect of blogging and the expansion of viewpoints and information that are now available to us thanks to one-click publishing is that people tend to become more focused in what they read. Maybe it’s inevitable. When there’s so much to hand, so many views to take into account, it makes life easier if we censor our own reading material. We want to change that (that’s why I started WRIPE) and we’d like to hear from writers who share our view that broadening public debate and popular perspectives is important.
Talking to one of Ireland’s leading tech bloggers last week he pointed out that the people he routinely comes into contact with know very little of what is happening in his area of expertise. His expertise is not so highly specialised but the people he meets have the blinkers on and are heavily focused on their own narrow interests: what they need to know for work. In a world of diverse views and wide-ranging subject matter, they self-censor their reading.
If your interest is internet technology then the chances are you’re going to spend your days checking out techmeme, breezing over to digg.com or reddit or picking over the days news from techcrunch and venturebeat.
These are great services and they are the well-heralded successes of the new publishing era. On the other hand, if people are to benefit from a diversity of views, it hardly makes sense to limit your reading to technology blogs. The big advantage that newspapers perviusly held over all other forms of communication was the monumental flow of information they handled daily in and out of newsrooms. That advantage is gone. But the ideal, of providing information, news and comment from across the spectrum of concerns is nonetheless an important part of the culture and one that helps democracy function.
We’re living in an era when there’s a need to regenerate politics and political participation and while blogging is going to play a role in that, its role will be limited if people self-censor their reading by focusing in on blogs in a narrow niche of interest.
At WRIPE we want to provide the widest range of information and particularly from voices that don’t feature in the meainstream but which resonate with our values. Our values can be summarised by saying: we think information is clouded by the special interests that naturally seek out an advantage everyday of the week in our competitive economy. They can be industrial and commercial, scientific, academic or they can spring from plain prejudice and ignorance. If we can find voices that understand that and bring expertise and reason to bear on it, we’ll all be better off.
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