One of the things interesting about networks in new media is that it is both possible to change them to more news based and that these changes can happen without having to alter them. That, is the stream of words and images flow through social to news and back again.
Of course what this means is that opinion and news can merge. If I were to note something it is the bringing to the forefront of opinion, either because it is, or because the time factor makes it difficult to be other.
What is the information content of this kind of opinion. To my mind, the naturalistic nature of the medium of new media is socially tinged opinion, stabilized by what may be more precisely termed information, that is generally news events, considered in a broad way.
Information is not necessarily about clear utility, I can browse the great library of the Internet to my heart's content and find fascinating information about long gone once mighty civilizations that brings no usefulness to my life. Social network information is like though information in flux, it creates a certain kind of experience, a texture.
So for example, a new media snippet about such civilizations may lack immediacy this medium needs (I am using this example because of the distance it has and a lack of connectivity with now, but it also interests me). By new media I am including content that exists on these platforms and also in developing homesteaded extensions.
It is that capacity to find opinion based comments that are interlaced with news media reports, which make for a news stream. There in general has to be news of a certain import for this to be the case, that which generates this is determined from elsewhere. However the opinions enable one to get caught up with this stream of events.
But of course opinions come from more immediate and specific experiences and moments in life, and this also makes for a news feed.
One can have things that are more related to the information stream in life on one's mind, things extended in time to be more like information, and here we have a power of new media, is that perhaps it can take these thoughts and give them both a life and a capacity to explore. That is, the determination comes from within.
This can be region between opinion and information, that is still opinion, but with information content. But new media provides a flexibility such that a range of expression around that region is possible, without having to be labored about it, in the way thinking is not.
It can be, one can think or work through issues and problems, and indeed to my mind one can do this as well on new media. It happens all the time, in different ways. One know what one is saying is going to be read, one does not really by whom, but it helps make it something more that a private thought, but it is still a thought.
It comes back to that sense of development in public of things, normally kept hidden while in gestation of necessity rather than necessarily preference. It is like some of that flexibility of flow from streams comes into the output of the mind, unsurprisingly since it is the output of the mind, especially when expression is free (ideas, thoughts ->words to be read). A new world for the mind and its textures of reasoning and being, maybe.
But there is something about developmental thinking that is of necessity as well, it has a life of its own, as the mind tries to create information with it. Few things it seems have total factual stability that make them clearly information, which do not derive from algorithmic sources - in new media the real world merges with this. There does seem to be a new medium out there. It is different, it seems to resist making it like things that already exist.
It kind of bends to those things, but then snaps back to itself, possibly with enhancements to it, having taken place. Now that is the medium, in which one can think on and with, expressing opinions to the extent one wants. So is this medium itself something that can then enhance.
Well, maybe one wants perhaps something that flows with you, but also takes you places. In that sense one has of going nowhere in an undefined sea, one also has something that pulls you forward, from the byways that expression can lead you into, a distant supportive structure. That puts an interesting onus and interpretation on the context within which one produces content.
The technology itself is developing, that is the vast, expanding structures one does this in. And the wealth to do this is coming from the medium itself as well as the markets. I wonder what this means for continued wealth generation. I would imagine it needs a trade off between mining and finding new mines, over time. But the finding of mines, can be something that potentially each individual involved can partake in, if they wish.
It seems it could be something which can take everyone with access to new places, as long as that freedom to find these places, continues, which gives a certain life to the idea of new worlds in new media. But does this change the nature of information.
What I am saying is that it may potentially enable the development of information, rather than degrade it.
But here we have the mind closer to the tools. Whether this increases the range of information is another thing, but it certainly seems to have already, in some ways. I mean here that there does to me appear to be an enhancement already in a sense of news. It also points towards the enduring power of words, because these snippets come in fast words, and that can be the most enthralling and revealing part of it, in the context of news/opinion flow. It is something like moments of information expansion from intense compression in snippets.