New New Media

New New Media. Yeah, it exists. Most people don't even know that there is a NEW media, let alone a NEW NEW media. This is because media is so rapidly changing it is hard to keep up! Both old and new media use the means of the mass media institutions but new new media is all about you.

Old media is described as newspapers and television. New media is email, websites, and blogs of old media. New new media is Youtube, Twitter, Blogging, Wikipedia, Digg, Myspace, Facebook, Second Life, and Podcasts.

Blogging first started in 1997 and social media grew rapidly from there. If you think about it, the creating of all of this new new media seems a bit invasive and strange but that seems to be the way that our society works. We always complain about not having privacy, yet we insist on knowing the latest celebrity gossip and knowing about every news story the second it hits.

The development of new new media really is for and by the users. Most of these platforms are entirely user based and thrive from millions of people each day getting on their phone or computer and simply talking about themselves to a group of 100s or millions of random people.

Now I myself am a avid user of all things social media, so I'm definitely not knocking the new new media however if you really take yourself outside of your shoes for a minute and look on it it does seem a bit ridiculous. Even more, if you think back to a few years ago when none of this existed, what did we do with our lives!

I see 9 year olds on their twitter and youtube accounts making silly posts and I just think back to what I would've been doing back then (probably running around outside with my friends.) While new new media does have it's obvious advantages we've also got to be sure to use it with caution or it could end up backfiring on us all.

The Citizen or the News?

This week in class we spent some time discussing citizens and their roles in journalism. We spoke about not only citizen journalism but also the citizens right and responsibilities in journalism.

We defined citizen journalism as "the audience participating in news media." The way that the media portrays citizen journalism it seems like a new outlandish concept. However, it kind of brings up a "chicken or the egg" situation. Clearly, journalism was a lot more monitored and focused in the early ages but in the end, even if it was mainly being sent out for the government it was still information for citizens. If citizens were engaging and reading the news, then that opened up the floodgates for citizen journalism.

Back in the day it clearly was not as easy to speak your opinion about the news and get it heard far across the world, but now you can do that with the click of a button. Some people look at this easy accessibility as an extreme disadvantage to journalism and the profession. I would agree that it most certainly has it's disadvantages such as the extremely easy ability to start and spread rumors around the world in under 5 minutes. However, it also has the great possibilities to spread the word of a national crisis in under 5 minutes. Websites such as http://www.twitter.com have revolutionized the way we report and receive news. Not only does the news have the ability to be in our hand, but also delivered to us on almost a real time scale.

I understand that a lot of journalists and professionals are becoming upset with the fact that bloggers are being addressed as journalists because one of the most important aspects of journalism is accuracy and bloggers are more apt to mess up without an entire crew behind them to help them. However, I do not think that we should simply throw the citizens to the back of the bus and tell them to stay there and let the big kids do the work.

I really admire the ideas of citizen add-on reporting and open source reporting. Citizen add-on employs citizens to add on to what reporters have already written, while open source reporting is more of a participatory collaborative effort. By bringing the citizens and consumers in to work with the providers, it will help the news media to be more keen on what the citizens actually want to hear. Also, it will provide a touch of the city or state that the reporter is writing about. Anyone can write a review or a story about something, but if they have never actually experienced it it becomes nothing more than a fiction almost.

I do not see professional journalism dying away anytime soon, but I definitely do see a continuous rise in amateur journalism and hope to see a lot more collaborations happen.