This article deals with Carr's in only the most superficial manner. Carr clearly wasn't saying, 'these two people had mobile technology, therefore people with mobile technology are heartless.' The two people in his examples used mobile technology in the same way, and were both enabled and (according to Carr), motivated by 'citizen journalist' technology to act unethically.
You can argue that link, or even argue that it doesn't apply in all cases, but Carr clearly argued for a substantive causal link, a meaningful thread running through: the sort of technologies that involve instantaneous broadcast, the sort of audience and expectations that grow up around those technologies, the behaviors that people develop to fulfill those expectations (and to satisfy their own desires regardless of any audience---the look-at-me-looking-at-this syndrome), and the people who acted unethically in his examples.
You may agree or disagree (myself, I think the issue is more cultural, and it may just as well have been a Fox News crew rushing to get a great shot of the suffering)---but Winer is being deeply disingenuous by claiming that Carr's thesis is as simple as his absurd, clumsily constructed Christian-British-Homosexual analogy. I won't claim he's being disgusting, because the step from logical criticism to righteous moral judgment is a precipitous one.
1. That he points out a problem with mainstream journalism (failing to vet sources), not one with citizen journalism, as he says. (Note: citizen journalism has that problem too, but not here.)
2. His definition of "citizen journalism" is far too wide, in my opinion. Moore isn't a citizen journalist. She's just a person who happened to be talking to her friends about an event as it happened.
If we accept the "everyone is now a journalist" definition that Carr seems to use, then journalism becomes something of very little value. Journalism is removing the signal from the noise, and his first example (Moore) demonstrates a failure on the part of trained journalists to do that properly.
His second example (the video of the Iranian protesters death) is tragic, but again, not a failure of journalism or journalists. It's a failure of human decency, perhaps (and one that's certainly debatable)... but that's another topic altogether.
Surely his point wasn't that 'citizen journalism' is bad, but that sorting the signal from the noise is extremely hard, and no one has really solved that yet. Certainly not twitter.
Also the other point that I got was that people are often more interested in whipping out their camera/twitter client/etc than actually helping/enjoying something/participating etc.
Personally I thought those two points were valid and worth making. Also thought it a bit sad that pg killed the discussion on HN, because I think it would have been interesting.
I'll grant you the second point, though I think you developed it further in once sentence here than Carr did in his piece. (By which I mean to say, the correlation between that observed phenomena and the rise in emphasis on citizen journalism may be valid, and would have fit with the topic Carr was editorializing on, but he didn't do a very good job developing that supposed link.)
But to the former, I don't think Carr was trying to say citizen journalism is bad, but I do think he was trying to say it often fails us. Unfortunately (for his argument), the example he picked was one of a citizen's voice (not a citizen journalist's) being amplified by a mainstream press that had failed to properly vet those reports. So that failing was with the traditional media, rather than new media, imho.
"They write something stupid, then people write rebuttals explaining how it's stupid, building flow and page rank"
37Signals is also guilty - however proving that the system works brilliantly.
Too bad all the rebuttals are typically incoherent nonsense making the original nonsense seem even more important and profound.
(edit: Thank you, I accept your down-vote as proof that the link baiting works and that you agree 37Signals and TC are both brilliant marketers as well as writers.)
That was actually one of my first thoughts upon finishing Carr's article: "sounds just like 37-signals". Attack random people, make controversial points (even if you contradict an earlier post), do anything to generate noise and traffic.
The article was about Dvorak ranting on how getting feedback was important, and sometimes you'd write just to tick other people off. So, that's where I took it from TC to 37s. On topic.
What's that video game where you pick the locks on the doors by solving a puzzle routing fluid through pipes? Same deal. Here, TechCrunch is the source. Maybe Scoble's the sink? Winer's once again piping the goo from place to place. But it's all the same sewer.
Gadgets and tech don't make people evil; they're just empowering the voyeurs and gossips along with everyone else. This all seems like much ado about nothing.
You can argue that link, or even argue that it doesn't apply in all cases, but Carr clearly argued for a substantive causal link, a meaningful thread running through: the sort of technologies that involve instantaneous broadcast, the sort of audience and expectations that grow up around those technologies, the behaviors that people develop to fulfill those expectations (and to satisfy their own desires regardless of any audience---the look-at-me-looking-at-this syndrome), and the people who acted unethically in his examples.
You may agree or disagree (myself, I think the issue is more cultural, and it may just as well have been a Fox News crew rushing to get a great shot of the suffering)---but Winer is being deeply disingenuous by claiming that Carr's thesis is as simple as his absurd, clumsily constructed Christian-British-Homosexual analogy. I won't claim he's being disgusting, because the step from logical criticism to righteous moral judgment is a precipitous one.