I was reading an opinion post on another blog this morning written by Jon Watson and felt I had to put my two cents into the mix. Please note that both Jon’s and my own post are both our opinions only. If you’re reading this Jon, this is nothing personal, just an opinion open for discussion and I’d love to hear from you (or anyone else that wants to comment too).
Jon starts off his post with the quote: “This is the fundamental problem with so-called ‘citizen media’. We, as mortal citizens, lack the ability to be critical of our own media and filter it ourselves.”
I believe that this statement is correct for some. I also believe that the general public lacks the ability to be critical of the main stream media, but that’s for another post. Jon gives an example of the top three news stories on Techmeme at that moment were about Facebook, going on to state that we are unable to distinguish the actual importance of “news” and giving several example from Google’s technology news that were their top stories.
Here’s the main problem as I see it, Google and many other news sites get their news from mass media feeds. The biggest here in the US are Associated Press and Reuters from what I can tell. It reaches a wide variety of interests and people from all sorts of backgrounds and professions. The “citizen media” is media created by the average Jon Q Taxpayer in most instances. Techmeme got the Facebook stories from TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and Webware.com. TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb being blogs written by random contributors about technology and Webware being a blog about web 2.0 applications. Those sites appeal to specific people, not the mass public and write to their audience. The general public might not care about Microsoft fixing another bug or Pakistan blocking YouTube (which several other countries do anyways). Techmeme grabs stories from several sources, including mass media like the BBC, so you are going to see news stories like Facebook adding tabs. The unfortunate truth is that quite a few blogs and websites are pointed to the average person and the average person cares about things like how many friends the have on their Facebook page, or what’s the latest crap flash game made that plays like another 200 flash games available.
I think that a small amount of people involved in the citizen media actually care or want to think critically of the media that we put out, whether it’s on a blog or even a podcast. Just like a small amount of people think critically of the mass media. And that’s the problem we have here. It’s not that we lack the ability, we just don’t want to bother.
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