We need to rethink ... a lot of stuff

Was watching a video on Jeremiah Owyang's site, and it ended with a statement that we "need to rethink copyright, authorship, identity...ethics..."  That's pretty much what I've been doing for several years now and have only, in the past 12 months, started to put into practice.

The assumptions are always there.  "That's not journalism." "That's not ethical." "You don't ask the tough questions."  So I've started at the end and begun asking the tough questions.  What is journalism?  What is Ethics?  What is a tough question?

Not getting a lot of real answers.  What I'm starting to find out is, in the midst of this very real sea change in how information is disseminated, parsed, consumed and created, we have assumptions, not answers.  Journalists have relied on the advertising departments of publications to insulate them from the decision processes that make up their ethics.  The mechanism that supports journalism has become the definition or journalism.  The tough questions are defined by whoever is not doing the asking.

But the mechanisms, shields and assumptions are falling apart right now.  It's up to the individual now to do their own thinking; to define and maintain their own ethics; to be ready to ask a tough question when you think it isn't being asked, rather than denigrate someone else's effort.

We are all on this planet together and no one is getting out alive.  We are the government, we are the ethical construct, we are the machine.  If you don't like the way it's working, stop complaining and do something about it.