I Think Therefore IB

The media has changed tremendously in the past five to ten years, and more changes are surely still ahead of us. You are all of course familiar with Youtube which was created in 2005 and probably watched some of the video highlights of the most recent US Presidential elections – some of which helped garner votes, others which worked to the detriment of politicians.

You have also tried your own hand at blogging, which is now an unmissable tool for the media and the public. Just about all newspapers now offer multiple blog commentaries, ranging from current news to specialised areas of interest. The New York Times, for examples, features approximately 60 blogs (!) on a diverse range of topics, most of which are updated several times a week and many almost daily. The newspaper also provides a link entitled Blogs 101, which has many interesting links, including one that “looks at the effect of the Internet and new technology on the media”. On this latter website you can find sections on the Future of Media and Citizen Media, among others.

Citizen Media carries a short article on the trend-changing event I mentioned in class – the tweeting of the Nov. 26, 2008 Mumbai attacks. If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, a micro-blogging network, you may check it out here. Yes, I know, it looks like you have hit a wall, but this is your starting point for setting up your own account and tweeting about whatever you choose. If you need a  more concrete example of how Twitter works, connect to Twitter’s search function and type in some topic of interest (e.g. current issues). A tweet with numerous followers is that of Obama, where, as I am typing, you can see information on the US president’s first foreign visit (to Canada). The page updates itself automatically, so just spend a minute or two there to see how this tool actually works.

Beyond Twitter, we also must not forget Flickr, probably one of the largest photosharing websites on the net.

Meanwhile, Podcasts, also termed DiY Radio, are changing the soundscape of the audio world. You have listened to some podcasts in ToK and English (Hindu Swastika; epistolary novel), although these were produced professionally.

Now, let us backtrack in time…. to July 7, 2005 – the London attacks. As you can read in this BBC article and well as this one, this event and the Dec 2004 tsunami in Asia significantly transformed the media.

If we go even further back, we end up in what now seems like media-stone age and encounter the phenomenon of 2003: embedded journalists. The BBC has plenty of articles discussing this innovation, debating the Pros and Cons of Embedding, the dangers involved as well as a report on how such broadcasting provided a sanitised picture of the war. (Please note that this report is BBC specific, but that other, including US, networks also employed embedded journalists. Whether the same conclusions can be drawn on a wider level I cannot say.)

This is of course only an overview of developments in the media in the past ten years, many of which are so recent that we still cannot judge their true impact. What else the (media) future holds, we have yet to see, but my prediction is that citizen media – in whatever form- will become more and more powerful. This, of course, provides us with a more ‘raw’ form of media (with particular filters removed), but also all kinds of raises ethical (and other) questions.