The foundation and building blocks of social networking
websites are UGC.
When there are natural disasters happening and the
television crews can’t get in they often rely on the citizen journalists to
provide insights, footage and something to report on. It is often more
hard-hitting and emotional than professionally shot news footage because it
provides a true insight into the happenings.
Citizen journalists have been useful during disasters such
as the Asian tsunami on 2004 and the July bombings in London 2005.
People have questioned that when citizen journalists are
helping to pridce news and broadcast it in dangerous situations are they
endangering themselves, and are the producers of the show endangering them
further by showing their tweets and footage that they are sending out.
Gate keepers are still there in the mainstream news
broadcasting as they decide what makes major news and what gets put on the show
and also in what order according to relevance and importance. However in the
less mainstream, the underground if you will, there are fewer gatekeepers. For
example blogger, if you use this blogging service provided by Google you become
a source of news if that’s what you decide you want to use it as. You become a
gatekeeper, but you can decide as to what you talk about. The same applies for
YouTube and twitter. You can set up accounts based for news, get a following
get people to send in news stories and you give them air time. Because of the
reduced numbers of gatekeepers on the internet it allows for niche views often
of minorities to get a much wider audience than they would in the mainstream.
It is thought that in the future there will be less
permanent based journalists, and the news corporations will move in a direction
of a coregroup that decides what UGC gets air time and what gets to go on their
website. Another view is that the gatekeepers and the mediators will disappear
eventually too and we will live in a world where the media is in its purest
form, uncensored and unmediated. However this does have negative consequenses
if the media does go this way, where people who can shout the loudest win and
those with racist views get to put their views across to larger audiences.
Could this create more hate groups like the KKK or the Nazis? There are huge
risks to an unmediated media, ones that are too big to ignore.
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