One needs not look too far for evidence of how life is becoming increasingly more digitized by the day. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have users in the millions who constantly update and check the profiles of their peers. Libraries, newspapers, and academic journals are digitizing books and articles to post on the Internet in greater numbers (refer to an earlier March 1 blog entry of mine that discusses this issue). Even right now, I am using this blog to communicate with anyone who happens to navigate to this page.
Amid this growing digitization of American culture, a fundamental conflict has arisen between Old Media and New Media. Old Media can be defined as the traditional forms of news dissemination—paper newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.—while New Media encompasses the new user-oriented, digital forms of news diffusion like blogs, Wikipedia, and podcasting. I recommend watching this video called EPIC 2015, which paints a very satiric and Orwellian picture of the future of news media. I will not speak too much about this video in this post because I plan to use it as a discussion point in my presentation in class on Thursday.
The rise of citizen journalism—defined by Wikipedia as “the act of citizens playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information”—has made many traditional forms of media worry about the future of their existence. You can view the statistics for the downward trend of Sunday and daily newspaper readership over the years at this website. This kind of participatory journalism has evolved from the time of William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and accusations of yellow journalism during the Spanish-American War in 1898 to the personalized, always-evolving medium we have today.
It is now possible for anyone with access to a computer and the Internet to create blogs or write news reports. Case in point, a South Korean online newspaper called OhmyNews a website where online users can submit news articles to be published and their motto is “Every Citizen is a Reporter.” With each citizen having the ability to be a reporter, everything is under closer scrutiny. During the CBS “Rathergate” scandal, for example, Internet forums and blogs challenged the authenticity of the Killian documents used to discredit President Bush’s military record and it was eventually determined that the documents were forged. Likewise, a blog named Little Green Footballs exposed doctored Reuters photos from the Lebanon-Israel conflict of Summer 2006 (click here to view the blog entry).
Blogs give every person the opportunity to take an active role in the public sphere and also increase the likelihood of exposing scandals and inconsistencies on all sides of the spectrum. While traditional news organizations worry that the rise of citizen journalism will have an overall negative effect on the nature of news, could it be that this is just what the news world needs? Or does citizen journalism lack the objectivity that many traditional news organizations claim to have? I look forward to discussing these questions and more on Thursday.
