The thing that bothers me about typical stories about what the Internet is doing/will do to the media, is that they presume that "the media" is and should be a collection of for-profit businesses. This, I suggest, is to completely miss the big picture, and I think this assumption proceeds from the prior assumption that this has always been the case (it hasn't—not even in the pre-internet years), and that Internet media should therefore follow the same organisational template. Consider this instead:

One of the most fascinating features of Varoufakis’ time as Finance Minister was his openness about what he was doing and what obstacles he was encountering. In contrast to the closed door ‘business in confidence’ norms of high powered negotiations, Varoufakis was frank and transparent about how things were going via his own blog site. Whilst Varoufakis is, for an academic, remarkably competent in managing his own media presence, his blog is not a carefully managed Public Relations tool.

Actually, his blog has been no different over these past six months to how it was before he became a politician. Varoufakis’ blog is an open forum where big picture questions are framed about global finance and political economics, and serious alternative interpretations can energetically dialogue with each other. This is something I have never seen before on a politician’s web site. Nor does anything like intelligent citizen engagement happen within any rank and file political party meeting that I have attended. In such meetings collective conformity, guided by the imperative of electoral victory, gives the average citizen exactly no contact with policy debate.

So what Varoufakis is doing here is harnessing the capacities of communication technologies to support transparency and genuinely intelligent policy debate, and thus empower the polity. Alas, the opposite of both of those trends is the dominant norm in the political use of the mass media and communication technologies.

A blog is a blog is a blog. I'm sure it's very nice to have the New York Times pay you to blog, but their "platform" doesn't get you anything over and above a self-hosted WordPress instance. Indeed, it may be may be more socially valuable to have independance from a roster of voices "balanced" to satisfy corporate imperitives:

As Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have argued, individual biases, together with a certain degree of pigheadedness can have advantages for group problem solving, as long as people have a minimal capacity to come around to recognizing the advantages of a better perspective, however grudgingly, and (my addition) as long as collective structures of decision making do not systematically entrench certain kinds of bias.

This is the advantage of democracy when it works; it harnesses mulishness and rancorous dispute, to reveal the information that is latent in the disagreements between our various perspectives on the world (which are inextricably intertwined with our value judgments). However, when certain people’s perspectives are privileged, the value of democracy is weakened. Their perspectives will continue to prevail, even when they are wrong. Weak arguments that they make will be treated as strong ones, while strong arguments made by their opponents will be treated as weak ones.

And this, in a neat bit of recursion, is precisely the problem with the dominant discourse about technological change. As a society, making the most of the Internet's potential requires that anybody so inclined should be assisted in cultivating the ability to read, write, and think well. The skills we most need to master are the ones endowed by a good old-fashioned liberal arts education. Unfortunately, the education system, first in anglophone countries and elsewhere since, has been reconfigured to privilege education that contributes to labour market "human capital". It is easy to be trained to use technology on behalf of somebody else, hard to learn how or why we might want to use it for ourselves.