The future of the media consumption will be greatfully impacted by the proliferation of amateur (The Joes) generated content. Nowadays the average citizen is able to write blogs, posts videos, and have their content amplified around the world at the click of button. According to WordPress, a blog host, over 100,000 news blogs are created everyday and an average of 500,000 posts are written daily. A significant portion of that number is from amateur or citizen journalists. I believe this sets a dangerous precedent for our society.
As a journalism student who is an ardent researcher of the goals and methodology behind the "citizen journalism movement", I have grave concerns. Professional journalists are trained from their basic courses in college to vet sources, strive to provide an objective view, and to critically analyze topics from a wide variey of perspectives. Many amateur or citizen journalists tend to write based off opinions and unreliable sources. Then they are able to spread their "tainted" content across the internet with ease.
A great example of this is the BP Oil Spill in 2010. A fake Twitter account @BPGlobalPR was created to mock BP efforts to clean up the oil spill. It posted tweets like "Think about it this way, the ocean is like root beer and oil is like ice cream. We just made America a giant rootbeer float!" The popularity of the account soon soared to 20,000 followers versus the real BPs account of 4,700. BPs attempt provides updates about volunteer efforts, links to video clips and procedures meant to plug the leak spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, was overshadowed by this rogue account. The person who created the false account had no respect to ethical /moral codes of journalism and helped spread disinformation around the web.
As a journalism student who is an ardent researcher of the goals and methodology behind the "citizen journalism movement", I have grave concerns. Professional journalists are trained from their basic courses in college to vet sources, strive to provide an objective view, and to critically analyze topics from a wide variey of perspectives. Many amateur or citizen journalists tend to write based off opinions and unreliable sources. Then they are able to spread their "tainted" content across the internet with ease.
A great example of this is the BP Oil Spill in 2010. A fake Twitter account @BPGlobalPR was created to mock BP efforts to clean up the oil spill. It posted tweets like "Think about it this way, the ocean is like root beer and oil is like ice cream. We just made America a giant rootbeer float!" The popularity of the account soon soared to 20,000 followers versus the real BPs account of 4,700. BPs attempt provides updates about volunteer efforts, links to video clips and procedures meant to plug the leak spilling oil into the Gulf of Mexico, was overshadowed by this rogue account. The person who created the false account had no respect to ethical /moral codes of journalism and helped spread disinformation around the web.
nice post, but I disagree that the "citizen journalism" is dangerous for our society. I would rather say that the inobservant audience and that big parts of our society aren't critical thinkers are the problem. Having the chance to read different texts from all over the world is fantastic, but you must now how to differ in subjective and objective.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you!
ReplyDeleteAnd I think, we’re going to move into making media that is primarily consumed by mobile devices (phones, iPads, and several other in-between sized devices). This means that bandwidth will become an issue, that we’ll have to think about different ways to package information, and that we’ll have to think about the various ways that information will be used in different physical contexts as well as by different people.
PS: its soooo hard to read ur post!!!! cuz this busy background!!!!!! -_-!