Citizen Journalism

In his article Twenty years of personalization all about the daily me, Walter Bender discusses his work at MIT attempting to construct a way for people to basically customize their daily news, with relevance to their personal interest. He discusses several applications that were put together in order do just this, all of which seemed to focus heavily on geographical data about a user and customizing their news based on information about people from a particular region as well. One application that was mentioned was called Fishwrap, that reminded me of a cross between RSS aggregator and an open (public) blog. It provided news in a variety of areas customized to a users interests, but also gave them different views on political and controversial subjects, much like debate in a blog or forum. Overall though I would say the programs are most easily comparable with RSS aggregators, which essential did the same thing as the software he and his student developed. I originally thought that RSS may have developed out of his work at MIT since it is so close to what he was describing, but, according to Wikipedia.com it was originally created by Netscape. From what I can infer from the article, Bender essentially wanted these applications to act as automatic editors, which sorted through news and determined factors such as relevance, importance, contextual significance, and how many articles on a subject to present, and in what order. I do not think we are quite at this level yet with RSS feeds, although they are growing more customizable in terms of what specific content we want to let through. The technology has not yet reached a level of intelligence yet to the point where it can process, sort, and present information to us nearly as well as we could do ourselves. The doppleganger program mentioned tries to accomplish this though by observing a user’s trends over time and feeding them news based on what it “learns”.

With so much information available and the means to decide which news we want to be fed on a very specific level, with regard to interest, it may be likely that we start to devote all of our time spent reading news to reading only about a few immediate areas of interest. This could potentially cause us to miss other news which may not pertain to one of our main areas of interest, but could have a large impact on society and be of importance to us. In the article entitled Democracy and Filtering, Cass R. Sunstein argues just this, worried that the more we customize our news intake, the less variety we will have in our areas of exposure, including exposure to traditional news stories (aka the stories major media outlets are covering). I could not help but agree with her since I find this notion holding true for my own habits personally. I find myself referring to an ever increasing amount of sources for news on a daily basis, but the more I try to customize my new feeds and the more sources I include, the areas in which I am receiving news on seems to shrink. I definitely do not think that this holds true for everyone , but, it makes sense, the notion that the more you can get exactly the news you want on the areas you are most interested in and in greater quantity, the less you will venture outside those areas to get news on other topics. On the other hand though, I feel as though when we are exposed to news in areas that lie generally outside of our typical areas of interest, we research that story further when we are on the internet, as opposed to if we had seen it on TV or read it in the paper. The reason for this is that additional coverage is so easy to obtain, we simply shift out fingers quickly and more information is provided.

Online Communities

Sunstein also makes mention of an observation that when people organize in online in communities centered around specialized area of interest, people seem t take more extreme standpoints, and basically take things a level or two further. From my own experience this seems to hold true in most cases, and I believe it is mainly due to three factors, being A. there is buzz or excitement generated by the group when these like minded people discuss their similar viewpoints, B. They feel safe, they can take their opinions to the next level and be less wary of ridicule or other criticizing them, and C. Because they are now in an environment full of these like minded people, they feel they have to distinguish how their views differer from other in the group, stressing certain aspects of their overall opinion.

New media for receiving the news such as blogs, allow users to be both the consumer and producers, but still emulate traditional properties of other media, in that an editor is doing all of the filtering, then reporting the news, an others are consuming it, and commenting on it. It is true that this method allows for a much higher degree of interaction than media such as broadcast or newspaper, but I do not believe that we take on the roles of consumer and producer at the same time for the reasons listed above. One news source which does allow people to play the role of both the editor and the consumer at the exact same time though is Wikinews. Wikinews essentially consists of articles which are originally posted by a user or users, then edited, reshaped, clarified, and added on to by other users who are at the same time being informed by what they are reading. In his work entitiled Wikinews: The next generation of alternative online news, Alex Bruns attempts to explain why people are turning to sources such as Wikinews as a news source, citing the centralization of major traditional media sources, which do not give multiple perspectives on the issues they are reporting on. One of the things that these major news sources do have going for them though is that they are often more objetive in their reporting that online bloggers, who may take a firm stance on an issue and be highly opinionated. Wikinews attempts to take the strengths form both of these competing news sources though, in that it offers multiple perspectives since the editing of the news is open to the entire world, and it also attempts to remain as objective as possible.

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