Citizen Journalism

The world is constantly changing. And the people in our world, their cultures, their communities and more are changing along with the world. In a time when traditional news writing is more about the sale of an article than the disclosure of information, we are starting to see more and more of what pundits are calling citizen journalists come out of the woodwork. 

For those who don't know, here's a quick definition for you, straight from Wikipedia, a source that exemplifies how everyday people can contribute  information on line:

Mark Glaser, a freelance journalist who frequently writes on new media issues, said in 2006:^[5]

The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube.

As we have seen in more recent years, citizen journalists have contributed news that impacts and informs the public . These facts come from the Online Journal Review:

• An online journalist broke the "Phantom Congressional District" story about the chaos in tracking American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. On November 16, 2009, Jim Scarantino, the investigative reporter for New Mexico's Rio Grande Foundation, discovered that the recovery.gov website listing federal stimulus money was riddled with ludicrous errors. His online story prompted other citizen journalists he had networked with through the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity to look into their own state's recovery.gov data. When all was said and done, these online journalists found that $6.4 billion in stimulus funds had been awarded to 440 non-existent Congressional districts in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and four American territories.
• It was an online journalist in New Hampshire who broke the news when Newt Gingrich admitted during an interview he made an endorsement mistake in a highly contested congressional race.
• A Watchdog in Texas recently discovered that the Department of Homeland Security lost nearly 1,000 computers in 2008.
• An online reporter in Minnesota got the attention of the state government when his organization, theFreedom Foundation of Minnesota, released a report proving that Minnesotans were leaving the state due to high taxes.
• And it was a reporter in Hawaii who delved into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pricey holiday trip, which included an astonishing $10,000 nightly expense and more than $21,000 in security cost to Hawaii's taxpayers.

What is more encouraging than these examples in the eyes of many is that  that citizen journalism has spread from some of the more developed countries in the west, to places in Africa and the Middle East. With the power of the internet and new technology, these citizens are using citizen journalism to expose injustice and accomplish incredible feats in nations that suppress information. 

Here's Katie Couric, with her top citizen journalist videos from YouTube. It's better than you may think. 

As the video shows, news reporting from citizens is becoming more profound and more important on a daily basis.As Geoff Livingston  wrote on Mashable:

Citizen media is seen as a benefit to society and democratic principles. Many organizations are actively dedicating resources to improving citizen journalism, including the venture capital-backed AllVoices, three organizations (Global Voices, Internews and startup Small World News), and the U.S. State Department.

Internews, Small World News and the U.S. State Department provide various training programs, grants and technical resources to citizen journalists. For example, Small World News, which focuses on conflict and post-conflict situations, is in Benghazi training Libyans to report stories using video. Its team of citizen journalists has been so successful that it is now breaking footage that no mainstream media outlet has been able to capture.

And over at the Society of Professional Journalists, they're even all-day workshops that offer topics such as these one-day workshops will explore everything from Journalism ethics to the use of technology needed to get started as  a citizen journalist. 

As all forms of information become more available for everyone to see, it is important that we both utilize this freedom in the internet age and also protect ourselves from it. Citizen Journalism represents a new frontier in newsworthy video and news reporting, and will most likely play a huge role in this enthralling, scary and new Age of the Internet. 

Wikinomics

This is a short, informative video that I found that features Don Tapscott, co-author of the book Wikinomics. WIkinomics is a relatively new phenomena that encourages the collaboration of many people together for a common goal or outcome, both in public and private domains. Nowadays corporations rely not only on the people within their company to produce ideas and products, they offer money to people outside of the company through the internet to find solutions to problems as well.

Today, people can not only read an encyclopedia but they can write it, as is the case with the popular website/wiki Wikipedia, which is ten times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica and roughly the same accuracy (Tapscott, 13). As Tapscott mentions in the video above, the time that we live in is a time of profound and exciting change.

We are seeing a shift in power from hierarchical institutions towards more power of the people. We are also seeing more and more inert or lethargic voters in the political spectrum self-organize and engage with political candidates through the internet, which in turn causes those candidates to re-think strategies during campaign tours, but more importantly will also change how leaders govern in the future ahead.

I found it interesting in this video that Tapscott mentions the fact that new generations don't see new, innovative tools and technology such as web 2.0 and beyond as actual new technology, because they are growing up in an age where these technologies are the norm. Just like we don't view the refrigerator as technology, they don't view the internet as technology. Sherry Turkle  talks about similar issues involving today's teens in her book titled Alone Together The teens featured in Alone Together  use the internet to create alternate identities or form social networking groups, but fail to recognize the value of the technology that they are using.

Brief Glance at RPG's and Their Effects

So here's a scene for y'all:

It's 2000 or a little before, and 6th grade Ray is down in a dimly lit basement by himself (crazy right?), glued to a TV screen with an SNES (Super Nintendo) controller in hand and a bag of Cheetos spilling over on the floor at his feet. He's about 80 hours in to the RPG (role playing game) Final Fantasy 7, and it's time for a bathroom break. He finishes his business, and through the vent in the bathroom can hear his game commencing without him. He has forgotten to  pull up his inventory so that enemies won't attack him.

He darts out of the bathroom as fast as his chubby little  digits will allow, throws open the basement door and stops in horror at the top of the steps as he  hears his character dying from below. He starts down the stairs  two at a time, his acne-ridden face twisted in fear and anger, and before jumping down the last two steps trips over his feet and snaps his ankle. He's left screaming in agony, army-crawling on the unfinished concrete floor towards the game controller like a soldier whose legs have been blown off. His character dies, and now he's got to wear a cast on his foot for the first six weeks of middle school. Bummer.

Gaming has come an awful long way since the 32 bit graphics and turn-based systems of many 90's-style  RPG's. In the past decade we have seen the emergence of many MMORPG's (massive multi-player online role playing games) such as Everquest and WoW that allow players to communicate and play with one another in gigantic worlds filled with strange creatures and time-consuming missions. We've also seen the emergence of next-gen systems like the PS3 and XBOX 360, which function not only as gaming systems but as devices with hard drives and internet connections suitable for Netflix viewing or even Skyping.

With these new avenues for interaction have come criticisms  and concerns from scholars and parents alike, one of which is Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together. From unhealthy pseudo-addictions to games like Second Life to the effects of violent video games on teens, the video game industry has taken its fair share of heat.

Some may see the scene described above with our friend 6th grade Ray as evidence to support some of these criticisms; I mean I broke my ankle after all. But let's face it, the video game didn't break my ankle any more than Duke Nukem came out of a computer screen to shoot up Columbine. Did it have an effect? Maybe, but the kids were loopy anyway. I think Mickey Mouse could have sent one of 'em off.

This debate seems a bit dated, but with each new video game that pushes boundaries comes with it a few shame-on-you-ers. I stumbled upon a great site that has archives of a plethora of studies and arguments from different angles, which you should check out.

Personally, video games (in particular RPG's) had more positive than negative effects on me. I had to use my brain to solve surprisingly complicated puzzles, come up with strategies  to defeat powerful enemies,  plan ahead, budget money (both in a virtual sense in-game and in real life so that I could buy the games), learn from mistakes made in-game, and persevere. Believe it or not, some of those  qualities I spent developing in a virtual world carried over into the real life one.

Then again, there weren't any next-gen systems when I was young, and as such I was never exposed at a young age to things like online game play (or online anything) where many new concerns about young people have stemmed from these days. Would I have turned into a lump of diabetes-ridden filth, obsessed with Second Life and my virtual girlfriend, both of us lying about our genders  in order to fulfill a fantasy which couldn't be accomplished in real life? Would I mimic scenes from Grand Theft Auto and beat hookers to death with sex toys? I doubt it, but there's no real way of knowing.

Anxiety and Social Media

What is intimacy without privacy? In the video below, Sherry Turkle (author of Alone Together) asks this question, and a follow-up question: what is democracy without privacy? Certainly one of the most cherished of our rights as U.S citizens, privacy is needed to maintain everything from relationships to businesses. Are we giving up this privacy as new forms of social media are becoming more prevalent in our society?   She points out that social media mogul Mark Zuckerberg has said that privacy may indeed be a thing of the past.

  I think that that issue of privacy contributes to to the overall anxiety that can come with social media sites like Facebook, and with younger generations of teenagers and children who are becoming more and more attached to their cell phones for services like texting. As we read in Alone Together, young people are becoming more and more concerned with the image that they present on Facebook, going so far as to create false accounts to talk to schoolmates about themselves to see if they are liked or disliked.

Anxiety plays a large role in maintaining this image. It has become common for teens and young adults to spend hours upon hours every week tweaking and updating their Facebook pages and checking their cell phones for updates on Facebook and recent texts.

 Anxiety also comes into play for college athletes a who are constantly worried about coaches or teammates viewing the pictures that they post, and for professionals concerned about their boss(s) checking up on their information and possibly demanding employee passwords to do so.

So since most of us assume that everything that we put on the internet is basically public and will remain so forever, like Turkle points out when describing the "Anxiety of Always", should we refrain from posting anything online ever? If a person can't judge between what you should and shouldn't put online for others to see, this may be the best route. And considering how addictive sites like Facebook can be, more and more people may be taking this route. 

ch. 10

In chapter 10 of Alone All Together, Turkle shares the views of several high school age students about how they communicate with friends. The students have become so accustomed to text messaging and other  forms of online communication that they not only loathe talking on the phone, but have created different rules and etiquette solely for online use.

For these students, and no doubt other adolescences and adults, the allure of  texting seems to stem from the fact that texting allows a person time to think about the message he or she is about to send, with time to edit and revise before sending. After all, if you answer the phone when a friend is calling and that conversation goes on longer than expected, nobody likes making up an awkward excuse to get off the phone. For the students, avoiding an awkward "good bye" is good enough reason to be completely tethered to your phone at all times.

As people become more and more tethered to digital forms of communication and new media, aren't also the abilities of those people to multi-task increasing? And is this a bad thing? Employers love an employee who can multi-task, after all. But at what point does multi-tasking and staying connected and always "on" become a problem, or even an addiction? Below is a video of Turkle taking questions from students, and she touches on the topics of addiction to digital forms of communication as well as where she sees the multi-tasker will be a few years from now.

So are you addicted to staying connected? Should the term addiction be applied to the droves of people who flock to games like Second Life, who use identity play to satisfy a thirst for adventure and newness that they're not able to achieve in real life? Do you agree with Turkle's views on addiction? Will students like Audry from chapter 10 in Alone All Together have to take classes in the future to learn how to unitask, as Turkle describes in the video above?

Marriage in Second Life

 Certainly one of the traditional stables of marriage is the bond, both physical and emotional, that the married couple shares together. Typically this bond evolves over a period of time, which is formed and solidified after two people have shared enough time with one another. These couples experience the ups and downs in the relationship, and after getting through the good and the bad times come to a point where they feel inseparable.

But what would it be like to be married to someone that you've never met in person?

Turkle tells a strange story in the book All Alone Together about a couple that tied the knot in the online game, Second Life. I had to ask myself- Is this serious? Can two people meet through a game, signify their marriage online with a ceremony  surrounded by their closest avatar friends, and have a successful marriage in the real world? Does the marriage even take place in real life, or is it only a marriage when you're playing Second Life? With these questions in mind, I did some research to see if there were other people with similar circumstances to the couple Turkle mentions in her book. There were no shortage of examples.

Several iReporters from CNN Living chronicled the marriages of people "in-world" (in Second Life), and most seemed normal enough. So normal and traditional  that it's a bit weird.

 "iReporter Hibiscus Hastings even visited a Second Life bridal shower. There were about 40 vendors and over 800 attendees, according to its organizer. It even included a fashion show and panel discussion of "wedding do's and don't's."("Virtual world, real, 2008")

Stranger still are those Second Life marriages between people who have significant others in real life, and are able to maintain those relationships in a healthy manner without letting their Second Life marriage ruin what they have in reality.

  "So, what is the relationship between the virtual bride and groom? When asked, both of them described it as "a giggle." Latte and Benelli are good friends in real life, each with a real-life significant other who is aware of their Second Life marriage. ""We get on great and  enjoy each other's company," Benelli said. For those whose Second Life relationship carries into the real world, Latte says it's "wonderful. As long as people don't get hurt it's a great thing.""("Virtual world, real, 2008") 

It all seems a bit strange to me, but like Roach Benelli (who didn't give her real name in the article) says, as long as people don't get hurt, have at it.

 

The "Information Poor"

While reading the 1st chapter in the book entitled "Reading" Cypercultures, I stumbled upon some points that Nayar brought up in regards to the flow of information in what is rapidly becoming, as Nayar puts it, our technocapitalistic  society. With all sorts of New Media infiltrating and replacing old forms of Media, Nayar points out  that in today's ever globalizing world that consumption demands technological linkages and synchronous, 24/7 communications. The flows of information that everyday people receive through the various forms of New Media are becoming more and more important in everyday life. But as these flows of information become more important in our everyday lives, what happens to the people who have limited to no access to this information?

Nayer states: "Increasingly, people, classes and territories that are not significant for the informational society are excluded from the wired world. The old, African nations, the mentally ill, the inner-city ghettos are all peripheral to the globalizing ICT movement. .... the high-tech age is driven by the need to posses ever greater amounts of information, and those who lack this (the "information poor") are left out of the race" (Nayar, 7). 

Automation, information gathering, and labor are analogous to mechanization from the early days of capitalism (Kellner, 1999). This was a time when a blue collar worker with a trade skill could provide food and shelter for his family, while keeping the peace of mind that his skill could be used anywhere in America.  But in today's technocapatilistic world, the information poor such as the poverty stricken, mentally ill and uneducated will fall through the gap, simply because they do not have the means to acquire the technology to keep up. It's like a digital divide in America, and one that cannot be boiled down to someone who has the internet vs. someone who doesn't. Other cultural factors such as language become problems as well, such as when a non-English speaker cannot find information about social welfare rules or job opportunities anywhere but online, and that information is in English only.

So what is to be done about the information poor? Government action? Media coverage? Free iPhones and "How-To" tech books shot out of t-shirt cannons to crowds of Apple-crazed homeless people? Do we have a moral obligation to provide these people with new forms of technology?

In an article I read about the information poor, Tim Mazur brings up the topic of moral rights. According to Mazur a moral right is an entitlement based on ethical standards rather than legal ones. An example of a moral right would be the right to subsistence, or to clean air. These are rights that everyone should have.The right to telephone service, on the other hand, would be considered a subsidiary moral right (a right which protects the conditions necessary to exercise a moral right). According to Mazur, since everyone has the moral right to safety, many states have made it mandatory to have phone service subsidized for low-income households to get help for a serious injury, because it is the moral right of those people to get help, and the only way to get help for a serious injury or tragedy would be to call 911 or the fire department through the use of the telephone. So in the future, should the information poor be allowed access to subsidized means of technology so that their moral rights are not violated? Mazur brings up the point that many ethicists "maintain that persons have a moral right to equal opportunity to jobs and college/university admission slots. Yet, if certain job opportunities are available only through electronic services, qualified candidates among the information poor may be shut out."


What are your thoughts?