Social Media Around the World

Sometimes when looking at the effect of social media, we tend to have a very Western-centric view of things. Because it is what we are most familiar with, we examine what it does to our own frame of reference. But social media, like the Internet, is a worldwide phenomenon.  If we investigate only the effects [...]

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Are You Listening?

One quality consistently praised is the ability of a friend to listen. Being a good listener is a widely respected quality. The commercial media system has had trouble with this one for a while. In lecture, Dr. Strangelove detailed Noam Chomsky’s model of society, which places the elites of society at the top of a [...]

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Citizen Journalism or Tool for Propaganda?

As was mentioned earlier, broadcast news relies to a certain extent on crowdsourcing, a way of gathering information using the public. This has become easier and more widely used thanks to social media, which allows for nearly immediate response. Crowdsourcing ties into citizen journalism, which can be described as the participation of ordinary people in the journalistic [...]

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Community Blogging – Keeping it Positive

As the “Local TV Matters” commercials would argue, we want to know what’s happening around us. These advertisements argue that local news is of utmost importance to us. To address this perceived problem, some communities have turned to community blogging to report on local events that they feel are not being adequately represented. Julie Fanselow [...]

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