Panel missed the issues - level of debate too 'corporate'

Have to leave the conference to do an unmovable meeting and sitting on the tube thinking about the session.

It seems to me that the panel missed the issues - not necessarily their fault as the chair didn't really challenge them enough.

When you read the brief notes I took below (and I was monitoring and commenting on the live chat as well) - you'll see the issue of 'trust' kept coming up. I thought that the debate was maybe conducted on the 'wrong' level; I'll explain what I mean.

Trust seemed to be a binary concept for most of the commentators (as in I trust you or I don't . . .). David Brain of Edelman got a bit closer to the shading and continuous gradation of 'trust' that emerges in the WE media world. David Schlesinger from Reuters meant 'trusted sources'. Other panelists confused 'trust' and 'truth'.

The spectrum I see is moderated/mediated by aspects of control about what we see, when we see it and who produces it. It goes from implicit trust (I trust you because of who or what you are; say the BBC or Reuters) through trust earned on the basis of shared or collaborative experience to what I think of as 'healthy distrust'. The experience of many people is beginning to move them away from the implicit trust previously placed in institutions like the BBC through to a more negotiated basis for trust. To that end, the thought that some sources are inherently trustworthy (like old established media) and some are inherently untrustworthy (like blogs) is nugatory and so the debate (which is what it ended up as with the panel) is conducted at the wrong level.