Reconsidering Carr’s citizen journalism essay

A few days ago, I posted an excerpt from a TechCrunch arti­cle by Paul Carr, who argues that cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism — which he partly asso­ciates with the urge to grab a cam­era phone instead of try­ing to help — is noth­ing but ego­tism bor­der­ing on a detach­ment from human­ity. “As long as we’re all los­ing our per­spec­tive at the same time...,” he writes, “then we don’t real­ize that our human­ity is leak­ing away until it’s too late.”

That post has drawn quite a few com­ments (for my blog) but they are on a slightly dif­fer­ent track than some of the things I’ve been read­ing about Carr’s essay. Hence the new post dis­cussing Carr again.

Dave Winer, who I respect more with each post of his I read, has some strong opin­ions about Carr’s essay, and he’s not the only one.

Winer is blunt, call­ing Carr’s arti­cle “rub­bish,” “dis­gust­ing” and link-bait, which he says is typ­i­cal for TechCrunch. Carr, he writes, is impugn­ing cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists by asso­ci­a­tion. In other words, by Winer’s rea­son­ing, Carr would also deduce that his entire crop was bad if he found a worm in one apple.

The arti­cle was link-bait, and the more I reflect on it, the more torn I am. Yes, the Twitter response to Fort Hood was a learn­ing expe­ri­ence and a reminder that jour­nal­ists need to con­sider their sources before run­ning with any story, and, yes, Carr’s arti­cle reminded me of that need.

But should I praise an arti­cle that’s flawed in so many other ways just because I can pull an abstract moral out of it? Would that be like find­ing the sil­ver lin­ing in the writ­ings of the Unabomber?

Yet, if I expect all of my lessons to come from texts that I agree com­pletely with, I’m afraid that I’ll never learn anything.