My dad once told me how important it was for his generation to see humans walk on the moon. He believed that that single event would change the world forever, and humans would stop stupid things like war and poverty from continuing to happen because it wasn’t Americans on the moon, but citizens on Earth. That helped make the world just a little bit smaller.

The Internet has been billed as being able to do something similar as well. Since the Internet belongs to everyone and no one, the ability to tell six billion different stories exists. The power of a computer, a connection and an ISP can link millions of people together in interconnected social networks. The richest man on the planet could find the poorest man in a chat room, and a sharing of experiences could happen, and perhaps both people could leave that room with new outlooks on life. These two people would probably never find each other in the “real” world, which is much more controlled and distant.

This is what makes Manuel Castells’ argument about competing networks so interesting. He wrote that we shouldn’t complain about corporate controls, but network controls.

“This is why to counter networks of power and their connections, alternative networks need to be introduced; networks that disrupt certain connections and establish new ones, such as disconnecting political institutions from the business-dominated media and re-anchoring them in civil society through horizontal communication networks. Networks versus networks.”

In order for the dreams of my father’s generation, and my dream of an open and free Internet to stay alive, we need to start developing alternate networks outside the current mediated systems. I have heard people say that the Internet is only the beginning of the future. Soon, we may not even need a computer to access information – there could be chips placed in our heads that allow us to access every library in the world at a second’s notice or watch a TV show without ever turning on the TV. Ultimately, maybe we’ll have transporters that can take us to any part of the world within seconds. The world will dramatically shrink and the need for borders would cease to exist.

There is value in making the world smaller, but at what cost? We could lose a great deal of privacy, as we are seeing now with the vast amount of information people post on sites like myspace and facebook. I just hope that no matter how much privacy we give up, the future still stays bright and the problems will be solved, just like my father hoped when those men first stepped on the moon “for all mankind.”

Questions:

1. What do you think will be the future of personal privacy as more aspects of our lives go online?
2. What’s the next big thing to take off in regards to social media/the online world?

We could soon be approaching a world where the mighty power of the copyright rules all. Instead of death plus 75 years for copyrights, it could be for infinity. Creativity would be completely stifled if no one could use others’ materials. The first major casualty of this type of world would be the public library. How can a person check out a book that isn’t allowed to be viewed without purchasing first? Your local Blockbuster movie store will have movies, games and now…books to rent.

“Lending libraries in particular are in jeopardy if publishers take the same hard line that the music and movie companies have taken, because in a pay-per-view copyright regime, lending becomes impossible.” (Gilmor, 219)

This world isn’t too far off, especially with the rise of the wiki. Electronic media will soon surpass the written word as the most purchased content. Libraries, like most “old” technologies, will become a lasting legacy in the “Pop Culture” section of most museums.

Gilmor’s chapters about the entertainment industries’ super-hold on copyright have scared me since my first Communications class four years ago. If there is one thing I have learned from a Communications degree, it is that corporate media consolidation is not the right answer for democracy’s promise for America. The 1^st Amendment is being whittled away, and the government, no less the people, is doing nothing about it. In fact, we praise Microsoft for providing better Windows software, instead of demanding our government to create more competition so that someone else can develop a better product. We ask Hollywood to release blockbuster movies faster on DVD instead of directing or producing our own masterpiece. And, probably worst of all, we let them copyright it for up to almost 200 years, guaranteeing that whatever message produced in the movie, song or book has been removed from the public sphere in our lifetime.

So what can we do? Give up, go back to standing in line at the movie theater hoping Iron Man 4 isn’t a remake of the past three and doesn’t completely suck? Or do we pick up a camera and make our own awesome film? Or grab a notepad and pen and do our own version of “the news?” Perhaps no one will see your 10-minute flick or read about how the police department doesn’t do a good job of serving your neighborhood. Think about, though, what could happen if even one person did see? Many of history’s greatest heroes and heroines started their movement because of an idea, because they saw something happen that they didn’t agree with, because they wanted to do something. We can all change the world, no matter how small that change is.

Questions:

1. What are the 1st Amendment issues involved with current copyright laws? In other words, describe the pros and cons of an “all rights reserved” media landscape.

2. As bloggers, how can we maintain our promise to democracy as the Fifth Estate when it comes to copyright? Should bloggers put more concern on protection of their words or the importance of spreading their ideas?

We are currently in the midst of a transformation of what a pandit is. Its definition is a “respected scholar,” but I personally have very little respect for most of them. In the ’30s, the “punditry” was a small, select group of intellectual white men who discussed the major problems of the day. Back then, though, this country was isolationist, so very few of them supported taking any action against Nazi Germany as it began its blitzkrieg of Europe.

In the ’70s, we started to see a more ethnically and socially diverse group of people enter the punditry. After Vietnam, many anti-establishment voices started to make the airwaves, like Huey Newton from the Black Panthers or Betty Friedan from the Feminist Movement. They were witty and hard-hitting, holding nothing back.

We have now entered an era where everyone has a voice, and with our current media structure propped up by corporations, only certain people, depending on their political leanings or how much money they will make a corporations’ stockholders, get to speak. Most of these so-called pundits don’t have their own ideas. Some get paid to report their version of “truth”, like the retired senior officers who took money from the Pentagon to travel around the country preaching support for the Iraq War. These officers never said they were being paid by the government – in fact, some said “in my opinion,” or “I’ve thought long and hard about this, but I feel we must support this war…” You get the drift.

Also, today’s punditry are also the journalists who host the many television news shows. Most announcers at FOX News are given the opportunity to provide any opinions they (and their owner) thinks are important when covering the news. Sometimes, they are blatant, like when they interviewed a soldier in Iraq and finished up the broadcast telling that soldier that America was so proud of him for bringing democracy to the Iraqi people and that the liberals in Congress wouldn’t deny funding to the troops. I about fell out of my chair when I heard that – this wasn’t the interviewee saying it, but the interviewer! Fair and objective?

So, if the pundits aren’t even telling the truth and the journalists have lost their objectivity, who do we turn to for the truth? Bloggers, or the new 5thestate. As Jamais Cascio said, “The only journalists…who should be nervous about the rise of citizen media are those journalists whose work can’t stand scrutiny.” (Stefenac, 101) Blogs can be the first (or second, third and fourth) lines of defense, and can bring stories that traditional media outlets passed over that have been dead for days, months or years back into the blogosphere light.

Discussion Questions:

1. Why should we care that pundits may be getting paid from certain agencies or corporations? How different are these pundits from Public Relations specialists being interviewed by the media, since both are selling a product or an idea for the people to buy off on?

2. If blogs are the 5th Estate, what are some ways they can fight through the gatekeepers and expose corruption and subjectivity in the media?

I visited my parents last weekend and spent some time watching a segment on a local tv station online titled “Does it work?” The show’s purpose was to take products shown in infomercials and to test them to see if the claims made about the product was actually true. Some of the products worked, some did not. One of my first questions about the show was if the makers of the products or the public relations firms that represented the products had had a hand in determining which products worked and which didn’t. In other words, did the companies represented on the news show use their advertising dollars as a way to manipulate the outcome of the product, whether positively or negatively?  

Advertising money greatly affects how our “free” press operates. Most journalists will tell you they are not influenced by advertising money, but most decisions in the news rooms are not determined by the journalists. What story goes where and what ad goes on what page is determined by the page designers, copy editors, editors and ultimately, the publisher. You will never see a story about an airplane crash story placed next to an airline ad. This would be detrimental to the advertiser, who paid good money to be in the paper.

This is why I think that, and this really makes no sense, journalism should not be funded by advertising, the free markets, corporations, etc., and should be firmly rooted under the federal and state governments. I still don’t understand how the most liberal television station or radio station are PBS and NPR, respectively. This is odd, considering we have a conservative Republican government, yet if I want liberal news, I turn to the government to give it to me. And I don’t really even think that “liberal” is the right word, but possibly fair, or crazily, objective (something you won’t get from the networks).

This is why we possibly should be looking to bloggers as our future “spin-killers” for the media. Instead of whistle-blowers and corruption-stoppers turning to major media to get their story out, they will probably turn to bloggers. What’s the point of whistle-blowing to NBC if you work for GE, which owns that network? Corporate synergy and media consolidation is killing the objective journalist, and that’s why we need bloggers to take to the cyber-underground and start getting the truth out there, one Web site at a time.

The best defense for a blogger is to do journalism and say you aren’t a journalist. Since mass media law and libel hasn’t fully been integrated into the online world, bloggers get to have the whole piece of cake, and slowly eat each and every bite.

Questions:

1. Why do corporations, especially public relations firms, want to beat traditional journalists to the World Wide Web?
2. Why is a “hierarchy of trust” online so important? Why do we need to assign levels of credibility to one commenter over another – corporate spin is covered under the 1^st Amendment, so why should bloggers/journalists be so upset about it?

I remember when a military reporter from the San Antonio Express-News embedded with our unit in Iraq for a month, and along with his normal stories for the News section of the newspaper and Web site, he also published a blog. He used the blog as an extension for his news reporting – he wrote about his impressions of Iraq: the sights, smells and sounds of war. But he went beyond that, and wrote stories for his blog that wouldn’t be printed in the newspaper. For example, he wrote a story for the front page about two helicopter pilots who were about to turn 60 years old, were best friends and roommates. In his blog, though, he wrote about their experiences in Vietnam, and how they felt about the current war.

I liked his stories, but really loved his blogs. He interviewed my boss about his experiences as a corrections officer for the ADX Florence prison in Colorado, the only federal supermax prison in the United States . My boss was from Texas, but the story had nothing to do with the war or the state – it was about his experiences 20 years ago in Colorado. This was a human interest piece that would still appeal to anyone reading the Internet, since the San Antonio News-Express can be accessed by anyone in the world; but you have to use quite a bit more resources to actually hold one of the newspapers physically in my hand here in Seattle.

He said his blogs garnered him more readers than his news stories, which shows that blogs are making in-roads into traditional news outlets’ business. I now wonder, though, that if he ever left the newspaper and started up his own blog, would he be successful?

The military hasn’t fully accepted bloggers as legitimate media worth being credentialed, so I imagine most reporters still need the newspaper gig to supplement the blog. This is probably a similar thought for many war correspondents, who don’t feel ready to completely pursue blogs as a primary financial endeavor, like Chris Allbritton. (“We The Media,” 155)

Allbritton’s adventures into Iraq unimbedded as a blogger are to be commended, but is very dangerous. Luckily, he stayed in northern Iraq, which has been relatively peaceful during Operation Iraqi Freedom. I fear he would not have been so lucky if he had been lurking around Diyala Province or Haifa Street in Baghdad. Many U.S. reporters feel queasy about embedding with American troops, but its still the safest (and I would argue best) way to cover the war.

Questions:

1. Why do bloggers believe they are just as entitled to cover news stories as credentialed reporters from newspapers or television stations?
2. What are the pros and cons for trusting a bloggers’ information? Pros and cons for being self-edited, as most bloggers currently are?

In 2005, the L.A. Times decided to try something revolutionary for an elite news outlet: they created a wikitorial, posting questions and comments from Times op/ed writers regarding the Iraq war, and let the readers write the commentary, with each person logging in next having the opportunity to change it however they seem fit. This is the model by now famous (or infamous) wikipedia, and needless to say, the blogosphere was excited to have an elite, paternal newspaper delve itself into the bowels of the everyday person and allow this type of interaction.

The wikitorial went live on June 17, 2005. This “experiment” was prophesied with the statement that “wiki this page” would be as common on news Web sites as “printer-friendly” or “e-mail this article.”

The “experiment” was a failure. Pornography ads flashed on the wikitorial, “Fuck USA” plastered over the screen, removal of more “intelligent” parts of the commentary were removed to post statements like “Bush should be tried for war crimes against humanity.” The page was established on Friday, but by early Saturday morning, LA Times editors had removed it. The page still exists today, and the two-sentence message clearly reflects both the sadness of the editors from the vulgarity and profaneness, yet they still seem to be optimistic that this may be used again: “Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material. Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged in with the right spirit.” http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-wiki-splash,0,1349109.story

For the sci-fi fans out there, this reminds me of Skynet from the movie Terminator 2. Skynet was an artificial intelligence defense system that went live in 1997, and learned how to control itself without human involvement, and would ultimately start the human vs. robot war of the early 20^th century. This wikitorial idea, to me, is a prehistoric, linguisitic start to this type of future. The mass amateurization of the press can result in a dead press; it’s not probable, but possible. If the gatekeeper press dies, and we all become the news, who is going to be right? Is your porn-funded news site going to be more right than mine? And once the Idiocracy-generation (another good movie) has taken over the news, will there be news wars? Will the elite press send out its journalistic soldiers to electronically “defeat” simple, “average person” writers? I hope Cyberdyne Systems is listening…

Questions:

1. If you were the editor of the LA Times, how would you have set up a wikitorial? Is there anyway you can think of to stop pornography posts, vulgarity or profanity, or are these types of today’s electronic social media just come with the territory?
2. Why would newspapers want to create wikitorials? Will bringing everyday readers into the news process strengthen or hurt traditional news reporting?

Sources used: LA Times, New York Times, The Guardian

I wonder if the natural outcome of Shirky’s article about the mass amateurization of publishing is to now wonder what’s going to happen when blogs and Webzines become the scribes of the 1400s or the journalists of today. Will blogs themselves allow for their adaptation to the future?

Shirky seems to foresee blogs and this idea of the loss of professionalization as the death of the term “journalist.” I don’t know if this is necessarily true, though, as many professional journalist organizations – newspapers, radio and television outlets – have seemed to embrace the idea of blogs. Since the 24-hour newshole and the limited amount of space of newspapers, or airtime for radio and television, many journalists have created blogs as a way to “add” other types of stories that wouldn’t have made the news. For example, the New York Times has the blog Baghdad Bureau: Iraq From the Inside, which allows reporters to write first-person accounts of their experiences in Iraq. Instead of reading stories about Iraqi civilians killed in suicide bombs, you might see a story about the troubles a reporter has getting through an Iraqi Army checkpoint, or an Iraqi’s trip to a psychologist and how this individuals’ inner troubles with fear for their life represented the same fears seen throughout the country .

Several blogs are followed by millions of readers, are making money and gaining notoriety in the mainstream media as a legitimate “journalistic” source to help with reporting. For example, the Daily Kos,  a liberal blog, is consistently used on network news as a source for stories. So, does this make that blog a journalistic source? Or more importantly, if the leftist blog quoted a confidential source, and the blog’s owner was sued for libel and asked to name that source, and the blog was written in a state that had journalistic shield laws, would he be able to not release the name, or has the state even declared that bloggers are journalists?

 I think Shirky is really onto something in regards to the idea that the word journalist is definitely changing. What is a “journalist” will have to be changed in the dictionary. Maybe journalist will have to become more broadly defined as reporter, or just simply, writer. More information by more people in more outlets, to me, is absolutely wonderful. But I don’t believe traditional news organizations are going to let themselves die. The elite press will still keep their roles as gatekeepers, but the individual writers will also use blogs to write about things they find important. We’ll get the best of both worlds, and one day, the molding of both of those worlds.

Questions:

1. What can bloggers use in defense of being sued for the release of their confidential sources or if a court asks to see their notes?
2. What can traditional news organizations do to either fight or embrace the mass amateurization of publishing? Will they turn to blogs themselves, turn away from blogs (as the New York Times does when it sues Googlezon in 2014 in EPIC 2015) or will it be a conglomeration of the two – maybe letting individual journalists write their own blogs, on their own time, on their own computers, and make money, as long as those writers don’t violate any libel or copyright issues with their parent organization?

After reading Stefanac’s chapter on the brief history of open discourse, I am fascinated to think about how different the world would be if we had computers, the Internet and most importantly, blogs, since humanity’s beginnings.

Imagine if instead of Jesus passing on his knowledge to only the 12 disciples, he went online, went to his blog Web site, and posted his thoughts and feelings for the thousands of persecuted Christian and Jewish followers throughout the lands.

Imagine if Thomas Jefferson posted the Declaration of Independence online and translated it into all the major languages for everyone to see. Would these words fomented just the American Revolution, or become one for the world?

Imagine if John Wilkes Booth had a blog where he posted anti-North and anti-Lincoln sentiments. Would Lincoln have been shot if federal investigators had seen Booth’s blog, followed him and stopped him from committing the assassination? Would Reconstruction have been such a failure if Lincoln had still been at the helm?  

Open discourse has never been more alive than it is now. We can go online, log in, and type whatever we want. We don’t have to post our names, addresses, and any other identifiers to who we are. We have little fear of losing our lives for what we type. This is where I think blogs have the most significance in that they can amplify the voices of those who didn’t have the ability to have their voice heard before. This is important, because everyone has a message, and with these new technologies, our democracy can only be strengthened by having more ideas and viewpoints passing through the marketplace.  Take for example SMS. It first started as a way to send simple, lightning-fast messages around the world. They are used to give people the local news, weather, or flight information. But they can bring down a country’s regime as well. They helped alert journalists to China’s SARS problem, and could help to bring to light China’s human rights problems as well.  

Finally, imagine you wanted to create your own alternate universe. So you log into Wikipedia, write that the American Civil War never happened at the top of the Civil War wiki, hit post, and log out. Wikipedia has parameters set up for where they can review your post, but what if it went through anyway. Did you just change history? Do we have possible time travel with the Internet? And as the Internet becomes more apart of our daily lives, what will history be – your blog or mine?

Questions:

1. As more printed informational materials like newspapers, books, magazines and pamphlets are published online, how will this change our traditional libraries?
2. Why do so many people object to Wikipedia, do you think? Several schools have banned it as a reference site, and it’s possible it could put encyclopedia companies out of business. Would we rather have someone else telling us what goes in our encyclopedias (which describe for the most part how the world is and what happened in it throughout history) or be able to participate in that creation ourselves?

I remember reading a book about the life of Ernie Pyle, who was a famous World War II combat correspondent. His gritty, realistic stories into the lives of the men fighting that war captivated a newspaper-dependent nation thousands of miles away. Mothers and wives hoped that Pyle would find their son or husband and write about him. Because the story was printed faster than mail, it was the fastest way for women to find out about their fighting men.

Thanks to the Internet, the military no longer needs to rely on letters that take three weeks to arrive. A soldier can come back from a harrowing mission, plop down at his computer, double-click on Internet Explorer, pull up his or her hotmail account, and type away. Within seconds of hitting send, mom, dad, or all of Pittsburgh can know that little Suzie or Billy is still alive. This revelation in the sharing of information has transformed the world in more ways than I believe any of us know.

From Glenn Reynolds’ postings on Instapundit.com to Dan Gillmor playing a part in the downfall of CEO Joe Nacchio (Gillmor, “We The Media,”), citizens, journalists, soldiers, even garbage haulers have the ability to add their informative views and ideas to the world. We will not just watch or read the news anymore; we will be active participants, through e-mail, blogs, user-generated movies or any other number of ways that haven’t been invented yet.

With the Internet having been created as an open-source world, there is hope that what’s created on the Internet can’t be patented, but copyright protection has been granted to online companies, and this, to me, is another form of a patent. Thus, we could see large aspects of the Internet become copyrighted, and I think this could create stifled creativity and innovation for the Net’s future. I just hope the trends of corporate consolidation seen in journalism does not spill over to the Internet, so that mom and dad don’t get the message that since Billy’s e-mail from Iraq wasn’t sent by their e-mail company, he will have to send a letter…that takes three weeks to arrive.

Discussion questions:

Why does Gillmor think that citizen-journalists will play as equally an important role as traditional Big Media journalists?

What kind of effect have blogs had on the journalism world, and why?