Thursday, 26 January 2012

Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism is when private individuals from the public play a role in collecting and reporting information. It is very similar to what professional journalists do.
New media technology, such as social networking sites, has allowed citizen journalism to be more accessible to people around world. The convergence of media has also made it easier for public individuals to gather that information, an example would be being able to take video footage and pictures with a phone.

The information gathered can take many forms; text, audio, video and pictures. With the use of the internet it can be spread across the world via podcast, blogs, personally created websites etc. It's basically about the public communicating information to other members of the public.

Thursday, 19 January 2012

Utopians and Dystopians

The historic battle between utopians and dystopians, optimists versus pessimists... only with a more modern twist which includes the media.

The introduction of new media and web 2.0 have allowed former audiences of media to turn into producers  in their own right and use forms of media to their own accord for different purposes. This, of course has instigated the battle between the new types of media, or citizen journalism, and the old traditional ways of doing things.

Utopians, or optimists, believe that this new way of using the media is an empowering force which can be used for good due to the freedom it gives the people. The world's knowledge is made accessible to the world allowing a plurality of voices, the voices of many can be heard. It's a more democratic system. Some use their computers to show what they can do with their creative juices and share it with the world via websites such as youtube.