As I said we would be, here are all 19 of us, in Anita Brewer Howard's Introduction to Mass Media class at Austin Community College in the late morning of October 26th, live-blogging.
Student and teacher responses to this morning’s discussion of weblogs’ impact on journalism:
Works for the spread of uncensored public opinion.
Is it like the journalists' Man on the Street?
According to census figures, only 50-60% US households own a computer. Is blogging just an upper-middle-class phenomenon?
Can be flammable and volatile in issues like the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
Problem with spread of false or incomplete stories.
The Austin newspaper did the right thing in not reporting racial incidents during integration.
75% of the news [in the MSM] has validation, but anything can be put on a blog.
HB's [Head Blogger] afterthoughts here:
When the subject of "how can we get some gatekeepers on the Internet?" arose, my own sense was that there was not much acknowledgement of First Amendment protection for a chaotic melange of all kinds of information freely available in the public arena, battling for attention and presenting competing best cases. The nation's Founders came out of tightly British-Crown-controlled rules for public expression, and knew its tyranny. This generation comes out of information-overload. Problems of Ideology censoring opinion, or Power censoring information, is often alleged but seldom experienced. They perceive other problems.
What I did not convey very well in response is that if gatekeepers are missing, editors do exist. For instance, if an unknown blogger reports some egregious omission in a news story, I check blogs that have a track record of being sane and accurate, and wait to give the story much weight until they comment on it. And then I will look at another that has proved reliable, to double-check. The discussion suggested that bloggers are free to create inflammatory lies, and that their readers will believe them. Well, no... Comments or e-mails will attach in droves, demanding the data and other, often MSM, authentication. Lots of room for challenges until consensus of some kind arises.
What I did not say well, is that, where MSM used to be the only game in town, even if a story didn't "smell" right, there is in the last couple of years a competing forum, a blogosphere, saying, "wait a minute, these are the reasons we think this is not the complete and relevant truth." It's almost impossible under these circumstances to bury inconvenient facts, though it raises lots of dust in the process.
The class' questions and comments were stimulating. They showed engagement with the deep issues of public information, the interface between information and power, and demands for public safety, order, and the comfort of reliable and inoffensive information. My satisfaction from participating in the class comes from signalling to new journalists that their field no longer affords sinecures in which they are insulated from The Whole World Fact-Checking Them from every angle .
Note to students in the class: By the nature of the medium, I have had the last word here. If you want to say anthing more, e-mail me and I'll post it. Good_and_happy "at" yahoo.com.
Austin Community College, where I taught Philosophical Ethics and was an Advisor to Students in the 90’s, is one of the noble (in its own demotic way) institutions of Central Texas, a place to study almost anything without having to drive on Guadeloupe Street (the local University “drag”). I’ve learned computer graphics, statistics, and many subtler but even more useful things in my association with it. Long may the Community College system prosper.
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