So let me begin my blog with a summary of my personal understanding of citizen journalism.
I can't remember when, but since a remarkable period of time I haven't followed the mainstream media to get up to date with all the current affairs. Instead of watching TV or reading newspapers, I read stuff from social networking sites where people update the newest stories by posting texts(could be articles, video-clips or whatever) of their own. If I got interested in something and would like to tell other friends about it, I could simply link the text so that I got it shown on my personal site as well.
Here is my rough understanding of citizen journalism:normal people become free to create media texts(mainly news) and publish them, at the same time any comments to these media resources are welcome. Gradually, the traditional media reporting is challenged by citizen journalism since the mainstream media is mostly lack of participation and somehow censored. In fact, in countries such as China where mainstream media are mostly controlled by the government, citizen journalism is playing a more and more significant role in terms of deliver information.
But regarding ethics and other media reporting principles such as privacy and copyright, those who haven't got professional training of journalism tend to break the rules without consciousness. In this term, more efforts need to be made in order to guide people reporting online and some restrictions are probably necessary to prevent the blogosphere.
What restrictions to prevent the blogosphere do you mean? Do you think that the internet should be censored or that the citizen's articles or uploads should be restricted in some way?
ReplyDeleteI think that in some sites, necessary guides should exist. Such as articles involving plagiarism should be warned that references should be included, otherwise the system could refuse to publish it.
ReplyDeleteOr, children oriented sites for an example, contents about violence or pornography should be censored, or refused to be published at least.
I do agree with you and think that it is reasonable, however, children do not just go to childrenoriented websites, they go everywhere. So censoring few will not help the whole system...what is the point of censoring then?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I agree...
ReplyDeleteAs I've written in my latest post, to censor or not is a quite hard question..
I now think that maybe it is more important to improve our education of internet literacy, rather than worry about potential negative influences.