Oct 27 2010
Who watches the Watchdogs?
For this week’s readings, the focus was the on the empowering of citizen’s as journalists and its effects. More specifically, the readings looked at what affects the empowerment of citizen journalism has, can, and may have on politics.
My first question of the week asked if the empowering of citizen journalist meant a draining of power from government institutions. Based on the readings for this week and our class discussions, I would say that if anything there has been a breaking of control that governments and their officials have on what information they want to get out into the public sphere. Some examples from class include the Republican National Convention’s attempt to make a site similar to mybarackobama.com and the story from Here Comes Everybody regarding the senator who expressed racist views at the birthday party of another political official.
In addition to these examples are the various news stories and youtube videos about politicians ranging from the extra audio from President Bush and Senator Kerry when they forgot their mikes were still attached to the Tea Party’s candidate Christine O’Donnell appearances on various MTV interviews. All of these examples illustrate the loosening of content control and the resulting possibilities to increase watchdog efforts on not only politicians, but on anyone involved with some form of publicity. The Brett Favre scandal comes to mind.
Unfortunately, and this is probably because this is a relatively new movement, what I have yet to see regarding the growth of citizen journalism and watchdoging is a power to help keep them in check. I have not heard of any group forming to act as a counter balance. Initially, it could be argued, the government was a counterbalance to citizen journalists since not all citizen journalists have the best intentions. However, with the drop in control the government has over certain areas I could see there being an imbalance at least temporarily. I suppose there is always crowdsourcing to make sure the facts are kept straight. There are numerous examples of it working across the internet so it is a matter of watching how crowdsourcing works in this context.
My final question for this week was related to the Shadow Government experiment in Iceland and how it might be replicated in a large country. Taking into account all of the articles this week, it looks like the Icelandic government is willingly giving power to the people; allowing them more direct input into new policies. I do not know enough about this and it is still too new to see how this will turn out. Also, presuming that it does work would it be possible to use a similar system in a country like the United States? A factor that I see being looked over by some people when they talk about using methods in other countries is how that country meshes. For example, the Scandinavian countries are relatively homoginistic culturally than say the United States. This can have a huge affect on how policies are received by a nation’s population. Either way, I am excited to see how this experiment plays out over the next few years. There is definitely potential in how they are using the increased connectedness of people.