After the highly profane educational lecture by David Johnson I got to thinking about the impact of blogging on my generation. I have always been a fan of self-expression and have been very quick to ask, "Why do you care what people think of you?" I have always believed that I had the right to say what I was feeling and those others had the right to or not to listen. Blogging I feel gives "every-day" people a platform to exercise that freedom. To clarify here when I say "Blogging" I mean everything that shows your self-expression in a way that people can follow you and your feelings, thoughts, art, etc. I believe people are blogging when they upload a song to Soundcloud and send it out to friends and others to see what they think. I see blogging as someone who designs a piece of art and shares it online. Blogging to me is just sharing ones self-expression online.
Journalism is under a lot of pressure nowadays because of the ease that it is to acquire information. Back in the day the majority of the people who wanted information about what was going on in the world would watch the "news" or before that wait for the morning paper. Journalism was/is a crucial part of the everyday life for the average human. Traditionally people would have to acquire information, have the information published, to then have it either read or watched via TV or newspapers. Nowadays the information that is being sought after is being found, at any moment, via the Internet. When Snookie has a wardrobe malfunction on a Friday night at 10:00pm the entire world can have that information and an accompanying photograph at 10:05pm! Information is now so readily available that it is easy for a lot of people in the world to just click on an Internet icon and go to their favorite news sources to have 24/7 access to what’s happening in the world in which they live. The difference between back when information took time to be given to the masses and now is that back then we had "certain" people being the journalist, nowadays any preteen with a internet equipped smartphone can be giving you the "what’s happening" at any moment of the day. The old school way of journalism is not dying its evolving. It’s turning into something that has become more of an informal group effort.
My generation or should I say the "connected" generation, are growing up in an age where technology has enabled us to speak to someone on the opposite side of the world at the drop of a dime. Blogging is just the "now" of Journalism. It is the information we seek its just that now we get it from a large pool of sources. In this day in age you can find blogs based on anything! If you like fashion there are blogs that focus on the latest style trends. If you like sports, there are blogs that focus on training routines of your favorite athletes. Blogs are the official voices of the people. It is now that people have a platform. Gone are the days where you would have to be published to get heard, or to have to land on TV. Now if someone doesn't like what they see on TV they can do more than just change the channel, they can create their own channels! Blogging is relatively new and is something that makes the "unimportant" "important." Blogging is what was needed to take journalism, not to its demise, but to its next step. We blog to inform, to humor, to engage, and to inspire (some to just freak you out o. O) but that important part is that it doesn't matter what we are blogging about, but the fact that we can blog and can do so on our own accords. Journalism isn't dead and blogging isn't killing it. Blogging is Journalism reborn. It is Journalism 2.0!
3 comments:
Malik - I loved the article this week. You make an excellent case for expanding the definition of 'blogging' itself to any artistic expression found on the internet - and maybe (just maybe) have encouraged me to broaden my own limited definition and use of the blogosphere to include some art/music/what-have-you. I also thought it was great that you picked up Johnson's advice that journalism and blogging are not diametrically opposed and ran with it. The more we consider how biased many traditional 'news' organizations/sources are becoming today, for the most part thanks to the extremely limited number of out-of-touch individuals who own the media outlets (I'm talking to you Mr. Ailes, Mr Murdoch, etc.) hopefully blogging - and other forms of online and everyday-person-driven journalism - has the potential to keep more traditional sources of journalism honest. If not, out with the old and in with the new.
d.
Malik: I agree that blogging and journalism are not competitors - they are complements. I don’t think, however, that anyone can be a journalist. It is true that everyone can report on something – today’s weather, the local school’s baseball game, the stock market today, etc. – but not everyone can report on issues that require professionalism. By professionalism, I mean people who can cover issues that require of constant reporting, of credentials through which journalists can interview certain high-profile leaders, of resources and people capital by which certain stories can be covered. Most citizen journalists are not full-time; most citizen journalists do not have the credentials by which they can enter the white house to interview the president; most citizen journalists do not have the capital with which they could safely go in and out of a danger zone. Most citizen journalists, like you said, have the power of freedom of posting – the power to post whatever they want, whenever they want. Bloggers do not need to satisfy a readership (well, most would want to lest they feel like wasting their time), so their posts are not regulated by an editor or by the societal standards of decency. There is a realm of information cut out for journalists, and there is one for bloggers. It doesn't seem like either one will displace the other, because the two work together to bring the general public the best of the news.
Malik: I definitely agree with the above comments and what you wrote about in your blog this week. I had never thought of "blogging" as anything more than a place in which individuals wrote their thoughts about their daily lives or current events. It was truly interesting how you chose to expand this definition of "blogging" to any type of information transfer, be it music or news.
Also, I definitely agree that modern journalism is experiencing a greater degree of pressure because of the immediacy the internet and phones provide people. All in all, great points!
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