I don’t want to add any more comment to the furore about cartoons (other than to say i) they were offensive and ii) they shouldn’t have been published and I agreed with a lot of what is said by Tariq Ali in the Guardian yesterday ).

What’s struck me is how this is the first time I’ve really used the internet to search for different news stories and views. I’m usually content with the following news sources - The BBC and the Guardian online - and the FT in hard copy and Newsnight on TV. But as events developed and more people wrote about it, I found myself reading a much wider layer of both news and commentary (including more blogs than usual). Why I wonder?

Many ‘big’ news events are disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or the Tsunami. You don’t really need a range of media to help you form a view or find out different angles (although around Katrina in particular there were different angles about the neglect and incompetence of the Bush administration).

An awful lot of news is local and a lot of it is bound up with crime stories or quite boring stuff. We tend to get a lot of ‘what’ (has happened) but much less ‘why’.

But more ‘controversial’ news creates a broader range of views. We are now seeing the maturing of a global news system and a global news industry - but one in which there are many more voices than at any time before. Some of the bloggers have had good analysis. What also strikes me here is that there is a global discussion going on. In some of the blogs (and at places like the BBC ’send us your views’ comment boxes there are voices from around the world, all being added pretty much in real time.

Despite the large volume of voices, there are a much smaller number of actual positions (which reflects real life, political parties, political philosophy and so on). The internet hasn’t in itself created any new politcal categories, but the creation of blogs and the like has made it easier to slot people into their categories because they tend to link to others like them and have flame wars with their opponents.

Perhaps there is a faster crystallisation of opinion because more people of the same political cateogory meet quicker in cyberspace than they would in the flesh. (In fact for the more sectarian and minority political views, some people might not meet people with their views very often, if at all - or is this too overstated?)

This new global news network is different from previous communications and news systems. For some reason I have the stuff in my head about Lenin and the workers paper. The idea being to get workers to write about their experiences for the revolutionary newspaper. I’ve never read Iskra in either the Russian or Englsh (in fact I’m not sure there are translations in English from the pre-1917 paper). So I don’t know if this ever happened in practice. I do know that many left wing newspaper editors in Britain have talked about this, but don’t remember many successful examples of it happening. Now however, we do have the beginings of the workers newspaper; it’s just it’s not organised or structured how we might expect or want it. But the beginnings of it are there for those who want to look for it.

There is certainly a lot more content available than before - and some of it is definitely worth reading. It can be local content with a global dimension. It changes not just the way we read, but also the way we write. How many people were writing for a potential *global* audience ten years ago? A tiny number.

A lot of this content will only be read by a tiny number of people, but that’s not the whole point. It is targetted at a potential global audience and therefore is often written in a different way. The new localism is the perspectve of the internet; and that perspective is international. From our localities we engage with a global community and to be heard, we need an internationalist voice. This might begin to impact on existing political categories, even if it doesn’t create new ones.

The developments around the way news is both created and broadcast creates a different sense of time and space and changes our everyday understanding and experience of the world. Global village was a good term in the sixties, but now a global city is being created. The experience of stepping into this global city is intimidating, exciting, stimulating and challenging; how to find a voice in this cacophony?

Voices will be found. It might be hard at first to get used to the jostling and bustling and huge mass of voices, but once people learn to do this (its as much a socialisation process as anything), more voices will be added.

And the potential then is that something new develops, something basedon all of the above, but which moves beyond it to a new stage of developement.

Global city; revolutions in the means of communication; all that is solid melts into the air…