Oct 24 2010
Framing Questions: Week 9
1. As some traditional news media sites allow spots for citizen journalists to post their stories, how would changing this around to where citizen journalists had their own portal site for their stories (alterity) impact the citizen journalism movement? Would it be more helpful for content gatherers, both for traditional news gatherers as well as information seekers, to post in a specific web portal their stories or would it be more harmful to have it set up this way? And, if more harmful, in what ways? Or should traditional news sites maintain the mesh of citizen journalism and traditional journalism thats set in place by some news outlets (such as CNN’s iReport)?
2. In the second article, “Interactivity and Branding, Public Political Communication as a Marketing Tool”, I found it interesting that the researchers labeled the politicians and political parties as brands when it comes to marketing themselves on the web. Considering last week we discussed how news organizations may need to begin leaning themselves more and more to this idea of branding their stories in order to induce a possibly needed “pay wall”, I was wondering if this same relationship is involved on political sites. If a politician’s website brands itself differently in attempt to accommodate supporters, how do they do so that differentiates them away from other sites that may contain political stories involving them? And if politicians attempt to brand themselves through more of a perceived brand characteristics involving style and behavior, how do they do so that sets it apart from what others could read about from other sites? Do these sites possibly offer more of a transparent view involving the politician as opposed to traditional news sites?
3. In the third article, “Shadow Governments: An Icelandic Experiment in Participatory Governance and Social Change” it discussed the ways in which crowdsourcing induces innovation in some circumstances involving governance. How does this differentiate from traditional political feedback? And how does this new way of providing feedback through sites such as the Shadow Parliament and Nation Builder site, change governmental views on direct democracy? Is it possible that more sites like these will be popping up in the biggest of the world’s developed, leading nations and change the ways in which democracy works? Or will these sites in other nations still be considered more of a “watchdog” or another political “estate” over the political realm?