The terms "new" and "old" media tend to distort rational discussion about the change in the way people access information.

Since this is a newspaper column, the odds are good you are reading it on paper, or on a newspaper's Website -- or perhaps on one of the Internet's "news and opinion" sites.

Here's why I think new and old distort or artificially divide debate into opposing media camps. There is good, informative journalism produced with integrity, and there is something far less -- the dreck of spin, gossip and propaganda. There is quality entertainment, be it high, low or middlin' brow, and then there is utter schlock.

New and old media both provide the good, the dreck, the quality and the schlock.

New technology does create new opportunities for sharing information and exploring ideas. The printing press and paper certainly advanced science and arguably democratic politics. First the telegraph, then radio, then television collapsed the "silence of distance," making near-instantaneous "news" possible.

Print and electronic media created new space for new voices and new ideas. The printing press became an "alternative medium" to the town crier -- a man likely in the pay of the local baron. Printing Bibles spread the Gospel, and with Bibles in homes believers learned to read. The priests -- the theological elites -- lost control of the text and lost control of the text's interpretation.

The digital "new" media expand this arc. Cheap digital technologies and the Internet permit individual distribution and highly individualized participation based on individual connectivity. Individual distribution and "lateral connectivity" have altered the media business model. Both evade if not quite escape the control of current corporate hierarchies, though smart "old" media organizations are rapidly adapting.

For example, every morning fewer newspapers plop on driveways -- younger people go to the Web and choose their news. YouTube videos shot by 19-year-olds get more viewers than many cable TV programs -- and their production quality is improving. Continued...