The Ocean of Information

This week in class we will be discussing Wikipedia and it's pros and cons. To help us prepare for this discussion we read various articles including A Stand Against Wikipedia by Scott Jaschik. The article discusses how Wikipedia has been infiltrating the school systems more and more and some schools are beginning to ban the use of it. Jaschik talks with several professors about the issue. Most note that Wikipedia does have some value but people are using it incorrectly.

The world of Wikipedia is such a catch 22 due to the fact that there is a plethora of correct information, some even more correct than the printed encyclopedias due to the immediacy that Wikipedia has, but there is also so much room for error in Wikipedia's system.

Here at Butler, all of my professors have told me that it is unacceptable to cite Wikipedia and would result in a lowered grade on a paper. I find this to be a reasonable rule, however that does not mean that I have never used a Wikipedia page for research. I think what people need to realize while researching is that Wikipedia is a good place to start but then take time to cross check your facts. Also, a lot of the time information on Wikipedia has a citation and there are links at the bottom to take you to the original source of the information.

Therefore my stand on Wikipedia is to not write it out of your research and learning overall, but just remember what you are reading and research further than just a single Wikipedia site. Anyone could be writing the article you are reading...

Gender Differences In the Blogosphere

We had to read an article THE GENDERED BLOGOSPHERE: EXAMINING INEQUALITY USING NETWORK AND FEMINIST THEORY which discussed what propotion of political bloggers were women. They took samples over a one year course and found out that a mere 10% of political bloggers were women. The reasons that they gave for this were 1. Women simply don't blog about politics, 2. Women's blogs lack quality and 3. The most popular blogs do not link to women's blogs.

It is pretty obvious that politics has been a "men's world" for as long as we've known it, so it's not very surprising to see a lack of women political bloggers. I personally do not have much of an interest in politics so this doesn't really shock or effect me much.

The second reasoning they give, that women's blogs lack quality, seems a bit absurd. However, I would agree that if women are blogging they tend to add their own opinions and feelings into the blog more often than men do. This may be an off putting thing in a blog if someone is trying to find hard facts about a political issue. The reader would not want to have to wade through 3 paragraphs of the writers personal opinion.

Lastly, the linking hierarchy that has been created by men. As previously discussed, we know that "info snacking" is the new way to surf the web. Therefore, if the most popular blogs are linking to other blogs, those blogs will then get tons of traffic sent to their site. Now if men are only linking to other men, it pushes the women's blogs even further down into the abyss that is the internet. Women can help change this by only linking to other women, however that could greatly affect the quality of their blog.

In the end, perhaps with the times changing and the prospective of more women in politics grows so will the appearance of women political bloggers.

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 Internet Is Ruining our Children's Lives

"The Internet is ruining our children's lives." You hear it all the time. People blame the internet for children's problems in today's society. While the internet may definitely add to some problems it is definitely not the source and sole cause of the problem at all.

Outside of class we watched Growing Up Online a Frontline program about a handful of different teenagers and their stories of their lives and how the internet affected them. While the stories told are not the only cases of things like that happening, I'm sure, it still only represents a handful of kids.

One of the stories was about a girl named "Autumn" created a whole online persona for herself completely without the knowledge of her parents and launched a whole new life on the internet. While the internet definitely allows for easier access for something like that, it is not like children were not sneaking off in the middle of the night or lying to their parents before the internet came around.

Honestly, how the internet affects children's lives really lies heavily upon the parents. I'm definitely not saying that parent's should have 24/7 access to everything their child is doing (like Cam's mother in the Frontline story) but they should be involved enough in their child's life to make sure that they are doing alright. Parent's should also make sure in younger children especially to monitor how much time is allowed on the internet and make sure that their kids still get to grow up playing outside and using their imagination rather that staring into a screen all day.

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.

The News is a Treat

This week in class we took the time to watch 'Frontline New War: Part II.'
The movie covered everything from the beginning of the news era up until now and even a bit into what the future has in store. They discussed heavily how the news nowadays has gone soft, and the news reporters main priorities are not even reporting news. While I can understand and agree with this concept to a point, seeing as how today's media is so obsessed with celebrity and fame, I also disagree in many ways. For every 'soft' story in the news line up there are at least 5 tragic ones to make up for that. I do not think that our time and effort should be put into investigating the celebrity cases before the real news, but I also do not think it is killing the news media to include it.

The video also said that due to profit motivation a lot of the news has lost it's sincerity. Once again, this is a concept that I full acknowledge but I do not think it is so cut and dry like that. Obviously we are aware that more or less everything these days revolves around money. However, just because a company sponsors a television show or station, does not mean we must then like and buy that product. It is a bit more enticing to  us when it is shoved in our face, but it is up to us as the intelligent viewers to make up our own minds about things.

The topic that was discussed that I was the most interested in was "info snacking." I am for sure a big time snacker. I cannot even tell you how many times I have sat down at the computer to do one simple task and 5 hours later still be on the computer, and probably not even with the first task fully completed. For those who do not know what info snacking is, NPR did a little blurb about it that I think fairly describes it's entire entity. With all the new and emerging technology out there, as well as social networking sites, it's nearly inevitable that everyone has "infosnacked" at one point or another. StumbleUpon is a wonderful site to start up your info snacking.

That being said, it's about time I wrap this up and get to snacking.