Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing.

I love that last line about magpie readers.

I can see the problem, but I think it’s about discipline. Avoid multi-tasking.

If you’re going to read books (and you should) or even long articles; you need to switch off the devices and focus.

Don’t worry, twitter will still be there – or something even crazier will have replaced it.

Journalists often over-estimate how much they know, and exaggerate their own importance.

But they’re not alone in having those shortcomings.

Where you sit is where you stand.

And people in different sectors of our complex democracy are quick to identify and lampoon the failings of everyone else.

Journalists ridicule academics for being long-winded (and dull), academics ridicule the superficialities of journalistic analysis.

Public servants sometimes think everyone in business is a spiv of one sort or another, while in the private sector bureaucrats are seen as rule-loving tossers.

These warring groups are not always wide of the mark in their depictions of each other.

More recently, we have had another cleavage thrust upon us: bloggers versus journalists.

I was cheered by Stilgherrian’s first few paragraphs in his paper to the media 140 conference. And this sentence, in particular:

This is why I think the whole bloggers versus journalists debate was and still is so incredibly stupid.

But what follows, unfortunately, is a jaunty run through the whole ’social media good, journalism bad’ story that has long since become a cliche.

A few more pars into this tour through the well-worn world of blogger resentment, we get this stunner of a summation:

Up the other end we’ve got big institutions like the Church, Science and The Media constructing narratives they call, respectively, Belief, Knowledge and News. All of them, when threatened, refer to their narratives as “The Truth”.

Oh dear.

Now I know Stig is trying to be entertaining and provocative so a certain amount of latitude is warranted.

But this sort of glibness doesn’t do anyone any good.

On the other hand, reading further I realised that this ‘critique of western civilisation in a nutshell’ really is the key to understanding the perspective of Stig and countless other social media romantics.

Folks, there is not such thing as truth. That was all a pre-digital idea. Now utterly redundant.

Once you get over silly obsessions like trying to work out what the truth is then you are free in Stig’s grand vision for our future to convey gossip along ant-like trails.

I’m not making this up.

At the end, in his paper’s coup de grace against the pretensions of journalists, Stig draws on a recent weather event to portray the redundancy of journalism:

Like ants mapping out food trails, people did this by passing signals to each other — interesting photos and factoids and emotional responses — without central control. And because they knew the people they passed them to, these messages had plenty of personal resonance.

When the industrial media factories creaked into action, maybe only minutes or an hour later, what were they adding to that process? Were they just packaging that collective narrative for the folks who aren’t yet connected to the live global hive mind?

Well there you go. No need for investigation, fact-checking, objective standards of accuracy, background, context. Not to mention a trained editorial hand to bring you the best writing and pictures.

I think we need more journalists.

I think more bloggers (and god forbid twitterers) should be embracing the skills of journalism.

I vote for excellence.

And truth.

I don’t want the ‘global mind hive’.

It sounds ugly and dystopian to me.

• Mainstream. The yes or no debate is over, its now about how. Social media is here and its important that we understand it and use it or respond to it in ways that are consistent with our corporate objectives. So social media should be in every comms strategy even if we consider it and decide not to use it or not to use it much

The Obama campaign is the current gold standard of this approach – they controlled message but they allowed people a great deal of lattitude in the way they helped promote that message

• Scalability. MySpace is dead, lost its cool. Facebook is too mainstream to be cool for kids anymore and Twitter is very limited. The more people using something, the more chaotic and junky it becomes.

• Nothing is dying. Media is fragmenting. Big media is still big media but there is more of it, more of it is delivered over the Internet and more of it has a participatory component. A fragmenting media means we as communicators have to get in front of people through a range of media. But radio will be here for a long-time, so will TV and so will newspapers.

• Content will be king, again. Especially content that actually contains new and important facts. Conversation is fine but it’s better if it’s informed. We’ve seen an explosion in opinion outlets. Crikey, the punch, national times, ABC unleashed. I don’t think business is using these outlets effectively. But opinion is great and can be important and entertaining, what is harder to do and costs more is the generation of facts – business and non-government organisations are well-positioned to help feed this need. But we’re not doing much of it yet.

This is important in a country where very few large organisations do.

So full marks for effort.

No doubt, Telstra’s re-entry into the fledgling field of corporate social media will be generally applauded within the small band of people who care passionately about this stuff.

But looking at Telstra’s new blog, called, in best marketing speak, Telstra exchange, I can’t help feel a little sad and a little more convinced that big corporates and social media don’t really mix – well, maybe a little bit, maybe as a little superficial gloss on the dull, besuited hearts of the corporate world.

Edgy, it’s not.

I guess this new approach is consistent (or ‘aligned’ in suit-speak) with Telstra’s new more co-operative approach to government and media relations.

Getting along with people is generally the best strategic approach, but it often makes for less interesting copy.

And the new blog was launched on a day when Telstra had to backflip on a PR disaster – a fee to pay your bill.

The media release on the backflip contained this wonderful example of the PR genre:

“I have listened to the community debate and believe that the way we introduced the fee did not align with our commitment to put customers back at the heart of our business,” Mr Thodey said.

“It is now clear to me that introducing this fee across our existing plans was the wrong way to encourage customers to move to electronic payments.

“We designed the fee in a way that exempted more than a million elderly, pensioners and disadvantaged people but it was still unacceptable to many of our customers.

Well, I guess that’s better than just saying ‘we got it wrong’ or ‘it was the wrong thing to do’.

Earlier today I linked to some musings by Steve Rubel about the blending of media and social media to the point that they are now the one and the same thing.

I think this is true, or will soon be true, of corporate communications.

Your social media effort will only be as good as your overall comms approach.

There’s not much point trying to get a social media fig leaf to cover up an unchanged culture where nothing is ever wrong, it just doesn’t ‘align’ sometimes.

Still, Telstra are having a go and that puts them ahead of just about every other big organisation in Australia.

And, it’s unfair to be too critical. I just wish..

Five years ago there was media and social media and the two were distinct. You know what was what. It was like there elephants and zebras. You knew the difference.

Today all media is social, all social is media. It’s impossible to separate the two.

The media all actively use social technologies to innovate, converse and collaborate with their audiences. Meanwhile, social content from friends – be it tweets or status updates or videos – all should be considered media. Yes, the elephants and the zebras have cross-mated.

Of course, Rudd could hope that this newspoll is an outlier and the damage is not serious.

More likely, he will have to turn the nob on the dial more in the direction of ‘tough’.

I suspect the people switching votes on this issue are the old howard battlers (socially conservative working class types who feel threatened rather than uplifted by migrants from other cultures moving into their neighbourhoods), a group Rudd did so much to court at the last election and to which he is particularly sensitised.

It won’t be pretty.

Rudd decided not to try and show leadership on this issue, and rise above the intuitive racism of many Australian voters, now he will be mired in the bog.

Scott may not ‘attend’ any particular church but he is on the Board of Management and Honorary Treasurer of Wesley Mission. His photo is in the foyer in PItt Street.

According to its website:

Wesley is a growing Christian Church and a Parish Mission of the Uniting Church in Australia, serving the community wherever the need exists.

According to Wesley, Scott is playing a critical role in shaping the organisation’s future. Wesley’s CEO noted in his annual review:

I was delighted to welcome Mark Scott, Managing Director of the ABC. Mark Scott and David Greatorex work closely with me in setting the course for the future.

There seems to be no particular reason why Scott, or the SMH, would overlook this pretty significant involvement in a religious organisation.

Given that the Wesley Mission turns over a $100 million a year, Scott no doubt takes more than a passing or casual interest in its affairs.

Perhaps, Scott considers his involvement a matter of business or philanthropy rather than personal religious faith.

John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor. So it’s not entirely surprising that he reveals in his introduction that he is “braced for objections” over his selections for “The Great Cities in History,” a collection of essays and images. He anticipates that readers will ask, for instance, why Timbuktu is included and not Toronto, why Meroe (an ancient Nubian city) is included and not Melbourne. It’s a dull question, and Norwich answers it dully, by pointing to the “in history” part of the book’s title. The better answer would have been that there’s not a shred of romance in Toronto and Melbourne.

It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have been found to suffer from “Female Sexual Dysfunction,” or FSD. Now, it’s unhappiness, and the range of potential “cures” is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva, and Harlequin, take note.