Will we be consuming artisanal news in the future?
Although an intriguing concept, it seems to me that Ice Harvesters were actually a lot closer to current-day bloggers who use outmoded methods – like aggregating content – than to news organizations who gather and distribute news. While Ice Harvesters were not able (and how could they) to the development of modern in-home refrigeration technologies, they are nothing like newspapers. How?
Many bloggers – especially of the news variety – do not create truly original content. They pass along what they find, and use someone else’s distribution method to pass it along. This is ice-harvester city. Ice Harvesters effectively were curators of ice.
Many bloggers – when faced with the challenge of producing original content – are stymied, just as ice harvesters were stymied by the change from remote to local production of ice. Were bloggers suddenly starved of the large news organizations that provide the grist for their mill, most would fall silent. They would not know what to write about.
A particularly funny irony is that today some people consume ‘artisanal ice‘. The ice that some refrigerators produce is not of sufficient quality for some folks. There is also a movement afoot in some specialty drinking establishments to ‘hand-carve’ ice made from special water.
Is it possible that we will someday be consuming Artisanal news?
