For thousands of years humanity used horses as a major means of travel and transport. There were other kinds of locomotion during that long span, but until the automobile horses were a dominant part of rural and urban travel throughout much of the world.
The first automobiles, considered from the perspective of horses (that is, as ‘horseless carriages’) might have seemed to the hidebound as a passing fad, or a narrow alternative. Within the shortest while, of course, all the world turned upside down. Automobiles are now entrenched, and they’re only described as horses in a reference to another era (of horsepower, or as Mustangs or pony cars).
Our media are like the early years in which horses and simple automobiles coexisted as alternatives. Old forms (print newspapers, in particular) are sitting uneasily in the same communities as new ones (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, text messages, blogs, email, etc.) Most of the papers have a top-down view of the world; most of the alternatives, owing to their diverse and diffuse character, have a more independent or grassroots nature.
Although there are hybrids that combine the traditional outlook of a newspaper with the Web, the tension in outlook between top-down and independent & grassroots will mostly resolve when one of the perspectives succumbs.
Even a decade ago, a single voice within a community seemed possible. That’s not true now, and it will be utterly and evidently impossible a decade from now. What’s the community, and what has it always truly been? Countless unique, and often differing viewpoints. One has a chance to see that, to read of it, today. Always true; now evident and expressed. They’ll never be only one, loudly trumpeted view again.
For now, though, it’s the two ways of thinking and communicating, sitting side-by-side, like horses and automobiles.
It will be this way for a bit longer, until there is a new environment where one outlook predominates, and the other no longer holds its former influence.