Jadimauro’s Weblog

Blogs and online journalism are definetely a challenge to mainstream journalism. It is a way for a user to continue research and go more in depth about stories that are presented in mainstream media as Axel Bruns stated in “Wikinews: The Next Generation of Alternative Online News?”. But as Sunstein’s “Democracy and Filtering” article states could it possibly makes us avoid other opinions.

I think that this is a great question, for me I had only really thought about the positives that online journalism and blogs had brought to people. It is easy, convenient, and can go more in depth than a newspaper because there is not a limited amount of space. But can it also make our knowledge of issues completely one sided. Could we become so involved in the “Daily Me” that we don’t really care about other issues and other opinions about these issues.

For me Walter Bender’s “Daily Me” article brings up a point that in his final experiment the hope was to make people have stronger journalistic skills and be more critical of information that is presented. And I think that this is what blogs and online news are doing for people. It is making them look at things in a different way and making them better experts on certain things. But I do think that it is very easy for people to isolate themselves from other ideas and other groups of people.

In the “Wikinews” article, wikinews was struggling because of lack of personalization and no one really wants to give just the facts online, they want options to give their opinions. And I think that wikinews is a nice attempt to have an unbiased site online but I think people want more than just the facts, the facts are just too boring. If it were possible the next struggle to create the great online newspaper or blog would have more than one perspective presented on a certain topic. If both perspectives were in the same place it would allow people to more easily compare and also have a greater knowledge of a subject. I’ve never really seen a site that does this but I think that maybe in a somewhat utopian world this would be helpful to keep people more informed. Maybe on certain issues one perspective would write and article and then the complete opposite perspective could write the same article, just a thought. If anyone has seen a site like this please let me know.

I think that there are so many good things that can come from online journalism but I just think that we have to be open to the fact that we need to explore outside our personal interests and be open to other things. I think think that it is completely possible for a person to be one dimensional about their news online and that scares me especially for upcoming presedential elections. And after reading the Sunstein article I think I will try to be a little bit more open and broad with the news that I look up online.