by Janet Johnson on March 3, 2010
The new Pew Internet and American Life Project shows how news is changing. We can carry the news around 24/7. It’s the ritual of communication that entices people to participate. People want to be a part of the “drama” of news–emerging media allows us to participate more readily. News is now becoming dialogically interactive–we now have multi-voiced reports that can give us a more vivid view of the world. As Walter Lippman said, “All the reporters in the world working all the hours of the day could not witness all the happenings in the world” (Public Opinion 338). With new emerging media–we just might witness all the happenings in the world.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project findings
The internet and mobile technologies are at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. In today’s new multi-platform media environment, news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:
- Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
- Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
- Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.
by Janet Johnson on March 1, 2010
I am challenging my class to collaborate on Google docs to write an essay about how the Internet tells a current event story such as the Chile Earthquake.
This assignment enhances our chapter out of Jenkins book Convergence Culture: Photoshop for Democracy.
This week you do not have to do an individual blog post. Instead, you will break up into groups and explore a current events topic assigned by me. You will analyze how the people used the Internet to disseminate information.
Critically analyze how social media plays a role in your topic as Jenkins did for the chapter Photoshop Democracy.
1. How are citizens participating in these stories?
2. What information did you find?
3. What social media sites did you find with the most useful information? Did you find the information credible?
4. Discuss the pros and cons to citizen media vs. traditional media such as broadcast news and newspapers.
5. Overall, how do you as a group feel that this current event is represented in a collective knowledge environment. Does the information get misconstrued, or more clear?
Hints: what are the search hastags in Twitter? What links are other people providing?
Overall, critically analyze the type of information you are finding and what types of Internet sites people are using to find information. Did you find Twitter to be more useful for up-to-date information than MSNBC.com or did you find that Twitter was useless.
