Do bloggers push the envelop for critically needed reporting with Internet’s new tools? Or are there far too many nerds who trawl the Web from one tittle-tattle to the next?
“Both,” answers a workshop on mainstream and online journalism. Organized by Probe Media Foundation and Sun Star, the Cebu meeting groped for new responses to new technology rocking this craft.
Huddled in locked homes from Damascus to Deir al-Zour, ordinary Syrians upload those grainy photos of marauding troops we see on worldwide TV. Twitter ripped China’s “Great Firewall” censorship to reveal that 40 people died on a bullet train crash in Zhejiang province.
In London, looters deployed Blackberrys to pinpoint movements by riot police. A Filipino driver groused on TV about lack of warnings in flooded areas. Cyber bullies pummeled him on Facebook.
“The usual constitutional safeguards against defamatory speech became useless,” wrote
Inquirer’s Raul Pangalangan. Anonymous posts by “new media and social networks, can unleash our worst selves.”
The Internet came on the scene in the early 1990s. There were 16 million on the Net at the start. By June 2011, over 2.16 billion were “wired.” The first cell phones debuted into the market half a decade later. Now, 5 out of every 10 people in the world carry a cell phone.
Asians bought one of every three. Filipinos were the first to wage People Power through text messaging in 2001, Howard Rheingold writes in “Smart Mobs—The Next Social Revolution.”
“Craven Eleven” senators sealed at Joseph Estrada’s impeachment trial the second envelop on secret bank accounts. Minutes later, text messages exploded calling for rallies. People Power II drove Estrada from Malacañang within days.
The Lebanese cloned that method and whipped up human waves in their Cedar Revolution. Cell phones were ubiquitous in Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution. But they were patchy in Burma’s Saffron Uprising, which was crushed by the junta Syria-style.
“Politicians created an environment in which lying became respectable by calling it ‘spin’. Spinning … is a nice uptown way of saying lying. And people expect no consequences.”
That’s the Philippines, right? After all, there’s an Internet café at the next block where anyone can say anything. Wrong. That’s the United States in the midst of the Watergate scandal, and the quote is from Benjamin Bradlee, Washington Post editor.
The Internet, cell phone and Facebook move truth—or falsehood—at “warp speed.” In the past, a scoop stood until the next edition. Today it lasts only until the next click of a mouse. “News organizations are already abandoning the race to be the first to break the news,” the Economist notes. “[They’re] focusing instead on being the best at verifying.”
The bogus Ateneo psychological profiles on then presidential candidate Benigno Aquino offers a classic example. Election campaigner Guido Delgado presented them at a press conference. When pressed for evidence, he bristled. “It’s the job of the press to verify.”
“In practice, the lowest editorial standards tend to drive out the higher,” notes a Pew Foundation study. “It creates a kind of Gresham’s Law of Journalism.” Assertion converts the press “into a conduit of politics as cultural civil war.” There is “a growing reliance on polarized argument.”
“Verifying facts is the central function of journalism,” Bill Kovach would drill into Nieman fellows at Harvard University. “The essence of journalism is a discipline of verification. That holds for a network TV news division or a lone citizen blogging on the Internet.”
At work today is a new culture of impatient journalism not dedicated to establishing whether a story is true. Instead we are moving towards a journalism of assertion. And the cost to society is high.
The need is for more, not less, of hard-nosed reporting of facts and commentary anchored on values, the Cebu workshop agreed. A split-second capacity to deliver unverified claims or opinion merely hobbles the functioning of a democratic society.
Countries with festering social issues, like the Philippines, require “sustained journalism,” Andrew Haeg of Public Insight Network told the Cebu seminar. Broader cooperation between mainline and new media can forge journalism that holds powerful people and institutions accountable. It helps make informed choice by citizens possible.
At any given online community, only one percent will create content, Haeg said. But 9 percent serve as editors, modifying content. The 90 percent is the audience. The task is to engage the audience or lurkers.
The Information Revolution, seen on the Internet, Facebook and other new media, is here to stay. “Searching for news was the most important development of the past decade,” notes Pew Research Center. “Sharing the news may be among the most important of the next decade.”
Fact-checking and editing, though, are tough work. Many bloggers bog down in chat, speculation, punditry—even cyber bullying. Talk is cheap. “A new journalism of assertion ignores the discipline of authentication,” writes Tom Rosenstiel in the updated book “Elements of Journalism.”
The emergence of cyberspace diminished the role of editors. Bloggers don’t have a similar resource. They are their own gatekeepers. That spells disaster when some don’t have even a nodding acquaintance with the moral codes that govern this craft. They morph into cyber bullies.
Both mainline and online journalists’ first obligation is to truth. “There can be no liberty for a community,” the late Walter Lippman wrote, “which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”
___
Via: Inquirer Opinion
***
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By: Drain & Plumbing
Toronto Plumbing Contractors
March 14, 2012
Aug 16, 2011
Jun 12, 2011
Thanks to the internet, we're all literary omnivores now
Where once the book world was controlled by the critical establishment, the IT revolution has shifted power to the people.
The koala bear lives on eucalyptus leaves. The goat will eat almost anything. As readers, we might aspire to the ascetic diet of the koala, shunning trash in favour of poetry or the classics. In practice, increasingly, we behave like goats.
As omnivores, we'll go to every kind of literary festival, from Bath to Buxton. We'll listen to crime writers, pop stars, atheists, pundits and comedians and probably buy their books too. The venues in which these encounters occur will vary from stately homes to church halls, from pubs to yurts.
At festivals, the British reading public today acquires books across an extraordinary range of talent from Jacqueline Wilson, Beryl Bainbridge, Edward St Aubyn, Margaret Drabble, and JM Coetzee, to Howard Jacobson, Aminatta Forna and Stephen Fry.
Long gone are the days when the Common Reader of Virginia Woolf's snooty label behaved like the koala and stuck to a diet of literary eucalyptus supplied by the literary-critical establishment.
Today, not only do the goatish omnivores favour a varied domestic diet, they also want foreign food, too. The shelves of Mr and Mrs Average Reader will include names such as Dubravka Ugresic, Amitav Ghosh, Christopher Tsiolkas, Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander and Roberto Bolaño.
These shelves will exhibit a farrago of biography, novels, history and memoir, traditional genres in a state of flux as they strive to adapt to the changing tastes of readers. Occasionally, perhaps prompted by a prize, there'll be a volume of poetry, for instance, Christopher Reid's A Scattering, last year's Costa winner.
How did we morph from koalas into goats? What has turned us into omnivores? The short answer must be: global technology. When you can get any book you want at the click of a mouse, what's to stop you surfing the shelves of the world's virtual library and ordering a copy on Amazon or downloading an ebook in the time it takes to write this sentence?
The contemporary reader has become an omnivore because the literary jungle is free, and available. No longer are we constrained by the conservative tastes of the local bookseller. Indeed, a bookseller such as James Daunt – soon to be the managing director of Waterstone's – will actively sponsor literary experimentation among his clientele, as good booksellers have always done.
The IT revolution has done something else to the parameters of British literary preference. Where once the book world was a closed shop patrolled by arbiters of taste such as Harold Nicolson and Philip Toynbee (the Observer) or Raymond Mortimer (the Sunday Times), now the shutters have come off all the doors and windows. At scores of literary festivals, and in countless informal venues, readers can encounter almost any writer they choose. They can listen and discriminate for themselves, released from the tyranny of the professionals. Literary power has shifted to the people and, every bit as important, English culture is being set free.
Release readers from the restrictions of fashion and snobbery and what do you find? Koalas becoming goats. A generation of omnivores for whom that old eucalyptus diet is not enough. This is not just confined to books. The idea of an "open" culture, partly sponsored by an "open" web, gives equal weight to many competing genres: manga novels, films, TV documentaries, magazine journalism, short stories, audiobooks, poetry apps, blogs, even YouTube video clips. Your contemporary goat will omnivorously devour all of these, possibly while watching Twenty20 cricket and listening to the latest i-Tunes download. In the mind of the omnivore, the book is no longer an exclusive phenomenon.
Not much of this is really new, though it can feel that way, especially if you're over 40. The first Elizabethans were also enthusiastic omnivores, drawing on an incredible range of sources, high and lowbrow, to find self-expression in many styles that are now lost or forgotten. Shakespeare, who wrote of his character Holofernes that he was "eating paper and drinking ink", is an exemplary omnivore. Today, the man from Stratford would be in his element, running Globe Films, a small production company, and living in some style with a dark lady in the Hollywood Hills.
Has Keri got a bone to pick with VS Naipaul!
VS Naipaul's remarks about Jane Austen and other female writers have finally stirred a fellow Booker prize winner – who has been silent for decades – into action. Keri The Bone People Hulme, who lives on the South Island of New Zealand amid sheep and fisher folk, has told her New Zealand audience: "VS Naipaul is a misogynist prick whose works are dying. He accurately foresaw their relevance three decades ago: 'They will not survive me.' As he ages, his nasty behaviour - and judgments - become ever more wince-making. Many thousand women writers both outrank and will out-survive this slug." The language of literary criticism clearly has a different register in the Antipodes, but Hulme's indignation was shared by many of the guests, some in ebullient spirits, at a gathering prior to the Orange prize.
Téa's Tiger feat walks away with the prize
And so to London's Festival Hall for the 16th year of the Orange prize, Britain's popular and reader-friendly prize for fiction. Orange's global reach now rivals Booker and the international shortlist, from Aminatta Forna to Nicole Krauss, reflected that. True to form, the favourite, Emma Donoghue's Room, was pipped at the post. The Tiger's Wife by Serbian-American Téa Obreht is a powerful account of the Balkan war, a novel acclaimed by prize chair Bettany Hughes as the work of "a truly exciting new talent". Among the onlookers, Tim Waterstone was talking up the appointment of James Daunt to the ailing book chain and Obreht's publisher, Weidenfeld, celebrated its good fortune. Obreht is the youngest-ever winner of this important trophy. For her, in a changing marketplace, the future's bright.
---
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/12/reading-habits-internet-robert-mccrum
The koala bear lives on eucalyptus leaves. The goat will eat almost anything. As readers, we might aspire to the ascetic diet of the koala, shunning trash in favour of poetry or the classics. In practice, increasingly, we behave like goats.
As omnivores, we'll go to every kind of literary festival, from Bath to Buxton. We'll listen to crime writers, pop stars, atheists, pundits and comedians and probably buy their books too. The venues in which these encounters occur will vary from stately homes to church halls, from pubs to yurts.
At festivals, the British reading public today acquires books across an extraordinary range of talent from Jacqueline Wilson, Beryl Bainbridge, Edward St Aubyn, Margaret Drabble, and JM Coetzee, to Howard Jacobson, Aminatta Forna and Stephen Fry.
Long gone are the days when the Common Reader of Virginia Woolf's snooty label behaved like the koala and stuck to a diet of literary eucalyptus supplied by the literary-critical establishment.
Today, not only do the goatish omnivores favour a varied domestic diet, they also want foreign food, too. The shelves of Mr and Mrs Average Reader will include names such as Dubravka Ugresic, Amitav Ghosh, Christopher Tsiolkas, Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander and Roberto Bolaño.
These shelves will exhibit a farrago of biography, novels, history and memoir, traditional genres in a state of flux as they strive to adapt to the changing tastes of readers. Occasionally, perhaps prompted by a prize, there'll be a volume of poetry, for instance, Christopher Reid's A Scattering, last year's Costa winner.
How did we morph from koalas into goats? What has turned us into omnivores? The short answer must be: global technology. When you can get any book you want at the click of a mouse, what's to stop you surfing the shelves of the world's virtual library and ordering a copy on Amazon or downloading an ebook in the time it takes to write this sentence?
The contemporary reader has become an omnivore because the literary jungle is free, and available. No longer are we constrained by the conservative tastes of the local bookseller. Indeed, a bookseller such as James Daunt – soon to be the managing director of Waterstone's – will actively sponsor literary experimentation among his clientele, as good booksellers have always done.
The IT revolution has done something else to the parameters of British literary preference. Where once the book world was a closed shop patrolled by arbiters of taste such as Harold Nicolson and Philip Toynbee (the Observer) or Raymond Mortimer (the Sunday Times), now the shutters have come off all the doors and windows. At scores of literary festivals, and in countless informal venues, readers can encounter almost any writer they choose. They can listen and discriminate for themselves, released from the tyranny of the professionals. Literary power has shifted to the people and, every bit as important, English culture is being set free.
Release readers from the restrictions of fashion and snobbery and what do you find? Koalas becoming goats. A generation of omnivores for whom that old eucalyptus diet is not enough. This is not just confined to books. The idea of an "open" culture, partly sponsored by an "open" web, gives equal weight to many competing genres: manga novels, films, TV documentaries, magazine journalism, short stories, audiobooks, poetry apps, blogs, even YouTube video clips. Your contemporary goat will omnivorously devour all of these, possibly while watching Twenty20 cricket and listening to the latest i-Tunes download. In the mind of the omnivore, the book is no longer an exclusive phenomenon.
Not much of this is really new, though it can feel that way, especially if you're over 40. The first Elizabethans were also enthusiastic omnivores, drawing on an incredible range of sources, high and lowbrow, to find self-expression in many styles that are now lost or forgotten. Shakespeare, who wrote of his character Holofernes that he was "eating paper and drinking ink", is an exemplary omnivore. Today, the man from Stratford would be in his element, running Globe Films, a small production company, and living in some style with a dark lady in the Hollywood Hills.
Has Keri got a bone to pick with VS Naipaul!
VS Naipaul's remarks about Jane Austen and other female writers have finally stirred a fellow Booker prize winner – who has been silent for decades – into action. Keri The Bone People Hulme, who lives on the South Island of New Zealand amid sheep and fisher folk, has told her New Zealand audience: "VS Naipaul is a misogynist prick whose works are dying. He accurately foresaw their relevance three decades ago: 'They will not survive me.' As he ages, his nasty behaviour - and judgments - become ever more wince-making. Many thousand women writers both outrank and will out-survive this slug." The language of literary criticism clearly has a different register in the Antipodes, but Hulme's indignation was shared by many of the guests, some in ebullient spirits, at a gathering prior to the Orange prize.
Téa's Tiger feat walks away with the prize
And so to London's Festival Hall for the 16th year of the Orange prize, Britain's popular and reader-friendly prize for fiction. Orange's global reach now rivals Booker and the international shortlist, from Aminatta Forna to Nicole Krauss, reflected that. True to form, the favourite, Emma Donoghue's Room, was pipped at the post. The Tiger's Wife by Serbian-American Téa Obreht is a powerful account of the Balkan war, a novel acclaimed by prize chair Bettany Hughes as the work of "a truly exciting new talent". Among the onlookers, Tim Waterstone was talking up the appointment of James Daunt to the ailing book chain and Obreht's publisher, Weidenfeld, celebrated its good fortune. Obreht is the youngest-ever winner of this important trophy. For her, in a changing marketplace, the future's bright.
---
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/12/reading-habits-internet-robert-mccrum
Jan 4, 2010
Internet spells death of English
TRADITIONAL spellings could be killed off by the internet within a few decades, a language expert has claimed.
The advent of blogs and chatrooms meant that for the first time in centuries printed words were widely distributed without having been edited or proofread, said David Crystal, of the University of Wales in Bangor.
More: Birsbane Times
The advent of blogs and chatrooms meant that for the first time in centuries printed words were widely distributed without having been edited or proofread, said David Crystal, of the University of Wales in Bangor.
More: Birsbane Times
10 Ways the Internet Will Change in 2010
Solid predictions for the Internet's continued evolution -- and how it will affect you.
Here's a list of 10 surefire bets for what the Internet will look like in a decade.
Read more: PCWorld
Here's a list of 10 surefire bets for what the Internet will look like in a decade.
Read more: PCWorld
Dec 30, 2009
Homeless Man Builds 5-Million-Dollar Website
Imagine yourself on the street, with no money in your pocket…
Depressed and discouraged?
Not Terry Hladyak, a Ukrainian immigrant who’ve found himself homeless in a few weeks after coming to Canada.
Terry used free Web access in local libraries to pull himself out of the street and make a good buck.
So, here is the recipe from a homeless immigrant:
1. make a website and divide it to 5,000,000 computer pixels
2. start selling advertising space for $1 and $2 per pixel
3. promise to GIVE $2.5 MILLION (!) to charities if you make $5 MILLION (!) in 5 years
4. make first money, buy a laptop, rent a place to live, and keep going :- )
More: Oddissimo, Toronto Sun, MakeMeShare
Depressed and discouraged?
Not Terry Hladyak, a Ukrainian immigrant who’ve found himself homeless in a few weeks after coming to Canada.
Terry used free Web access in local libraries to pull himself out of the street and make a good buck.
So, here is the recipe from a homeless immigrant:
1. make a website and divide it to 5,000,000 computer pixels
2. start selling advertising space for $1 and $2 per pixel
3. promise to GIVE $2.5 MILLION (!) to charities if you make $5 MILLION (!) in 5 years
4. make first money, buy a laptop, rent a place to live, and keep going :- )
More: Oddissimo, Toronto Sun, MakeMeShare
Dec 23, 2009
2009 - the social year
It's been the year of the social web, with billions of people finding new ways to communicate everything from their campaign to make Rage Against the Machine the Christmas number one, to their fury at repression in Iran.
More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/12/2009_the_social_year.html
More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/12/2009_the_social_year.html
It's not what you know any more, but how you `feel'
On Internet, average Joe sees his view on climate as equal to the `so-called experts'.
The notion that the everyman's wisdom can trump formal training is a powerful one, especially in the United States.
Read more: http://www.thestar.com/news/sciencetech/environment/copenhagensummit/article/739940--it-s-not-what-you-know-any-more-but-how-you-feel
The notion that the everyman's wisdom can trump formal training is a powerful one, especially in the United States.
Read more: http://www.thestar.com/news/sciencetech/environment/copenhagensummit/article/739940--it-s-not-what-you-know-any-more-but-how-you-feel
Social media challenges social rules
"Behaviours developed for the industrial age simply cannot cope with the new possibilities for information sharing."
Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8352295.stm
Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8352295.stm
Six Million More Seniors Using the Web than Five Years Ago
While people 65 and older still make up less than 10 percent of the active Internet universe, their numbers are on the rise. In the last five years, the number of seniors actively using the Internet has increased by more than 55 percent, from 11.3 million active users in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Among people 65+, the growth of women in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.
Read more: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/six-million-more-seniors-using-the-web-than-five-years-ago/
Read more: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/six-million-more-seniors-using-the-web-than-five-years-ago/
You Can Take It With You: Future Trends in Media
While still in the early stages of a digital media revolution, the consumer has entered an age of enlightenment with expanded options for devices, content, and schedule. The consumer has responded with expanded use of those media options. But changes in technology, regulation, pricing, content distribution deals, etc., will complicate predicting the future growth (and future winners).
Read more: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/you-can-take-it-with-you-future-trends-in-media/
Read more: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/you-can-take-it-with-you-future-trends-in-media/
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