The internet provides great entertainment and yet most people don’t really understand how exactly it works. Warning: The clip below from The IT Crowd doesn’t actually explain anything.
I thought it made sense to post a YouTube clip for this post as I seem to have been catching up on watching funny/weird/strange clips over the past couple of weeks. It’s great that this can all be shared so easily and I wonder if the ‘elders of the internet’ ever imagined how it would eventually be used. And just in case you were wondering, here is a sample of the ‘Top 25 YouTube Videos of all Time’.
I have been reading some interesting articles on how people spend their time on the internet. When the internet was first introduced to the world it quickly became a tool for communication and sharing information. Now in 2010, the internet plays a role in just about every business, non-profit society and organisation, and individuals life.
Some of the statistics reported by the Huffington Post relating to internet use by Americans showed that in a single month, a web user visits 2,646 sites and logs on 57 times – that’s a lot of information to be digesting! The report also highlighted the ever increasing popularity of social networking sites, with 70% of American internet users engaging in social networking. While in Brazil, a huge 90% of active internet users participate in social networking.
Another report in the Tech Chronicles of the San Francisco Chronicle reported how people are spending less time emailing and more time instant messaging. The report goes on to state that “In the past four years, people have been spending 37 percent more time getting news and entertainment online and less time communicating and making purchases online”.
Another article on TechPaparazzi listed the top internet brands – by percentage of online user visitors – with Google at 82%, followed by MSN/Bing (on 62%), Facebook (54%), Yahoo (53%), Microsoft (48%) and YouTube (47%).
Finally, this article published on TheOnlineMom highlights the increasing diversity of web users outside of the tech-obsessed younger generations. It shows that social networking rates higher than online gaming, internet and emailing in a ranking of the top ten sectors by share of US internet time.
These articles show an interesting shift away from simple emailing and data sharing, to more complex forms of internet usage. It also highlights the increasing popularity of social networking and the increasing desire for individuals not just to participate online, but to have an ‘online profile’ that is shared with the virtual community.
I attended the Jay Rosen talk for the Walkley Foundation on Tuesday 17th August. This post is a brief summary and discussion of some of the points that were raised during the talk that I felt were of particular interest. As a brief introduction, Rosen is the author of the blog PressThink and is a professor of journalism at New York University (read more about Jay Rosen here).
Rosen opened with a reference to a scene from the 1976 movie Network in which a broadcaster engages with his audience by encouraging them to stick their heads out of the window and yell a mantra “I’m mad as hell, and I won’t take it anymore…” (see YouTube clip below).
This is compared to the current state of the mass media, in which viewers feel more engaged and connected with content and there is constant interaction between interested parties.Where there used to be an audience of readers, listeners & consumers, now we have an audience that is empowered to distribute and edit news through blogs, podcasting, email, YouTube and other social media.
On his blog, Rosen writes aboutThe Citizens Agenda in Campaign Coverage, which looks at the concept of engaging audiences more closely in defining the types of questions that they want answered by their politicians during campaign coverage. The post looks at the development of a “Citizens Agenda”, which Rosen argues should form the basis of serious discussion between politicians, journalists and key stakeholders during the course of the campaign.
The two main themes of the talk that I found particularly interesting were the concept of “Crowd Sourcing” and “Citizen Journalism”. Crowd sourcing is essentially outsourcing labour to a large group or community by means of an open call. Rosen gave two examples of crowd sourcing. The first, by the blog TPMMuckraker, who used their audience to help trawl through 3,000 pages of emails in search of information relating to the US housing crash. The second example given was Guardian.co.uk, who used crowd sourcing to scan through thousands of pages of documents relating to the expenditure of Member’s of Parliament during the British MP’s expenses scandal. In both examples, the public’s enthusiasm for the story of the day was channeled by journalists to assist in researching and disseminating the news with a speed that would have not otherwise been possible. This also no doubt helped readers to feel more engaged in the news-making and reporting process.
Citizen Journalism is the concept of members of the public playing an active role in the creation and dissemination of news and information. It is defined by Rosen in the video below.
Individuals are now empowered to set themselves up as content creators and sharers through a wide range of new digital media. In his talk, Rosen discussed the changing media landscape, pointing to the incorporation of blogs with traditional media sources and the ‘unbundling’ of the news as more people turn to the internet for content. He gave the example of Spot.Us who funded their story on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (and other stories) by soliciting donations from interested readers.
When you look at these examples, this new age of journalism seems to represent a kind of mass media utopia in which people from all angles are encouraged to participate and share knowledge (and sometimes wealth) – and in which most content is available to us free online 24/7. Rosen argues that there are positive and negatives to this new age of journalism (i.e. it makes open source journalism possible, but provides an outlet for terrorist organisations to plan and communicate). I found the talk very interesting and it gave me some new insights into the evolution of journalism and the mass media over the past few decades.
Red Blog 