Hello Internet journalists and readers. My name is Zeyu Zhu and I am currently a junior majoring in Electrical Engineering at Cornell University. My interests in my field are signal processing and telecommunications, thus I am fairly well-versed in the technical area of electronic communications. My hobbies include bowling, taking walks around the lake, reading, and listening to music. After living for two years in a slightly damper, much greener and inconceivably colder version of Death Valley that some refer to as "Ithaca" I have become quite accustomed to the ever shifting weather and the permanent need to carry an umbrella. On weekends I like to visit the Pyramid Mall, a small collection of stores bunched together at a rather inconvenient location that, in a real city, would likely be dismissed as no more than a local shopping center.
Of all the recent explosions of Internet trends and phenomena, online journalism or "blogging," has experienced arguably the most rapid adaptation by Internet users. Despite the inelegant name ("blogging? Does that mean microwaving all the leftovers from over the week so they would mush together and form something marginally edible?") and the requirement of personal will to type up articles for (generally) no pay, blogging has blossomed from a geeky, technically-minded version of "Dear Diary" to a form of expression used by anyone of almost any age and mindset (aside from the Luddites, of course).
Wonderful. The First Amendment has being guaranteed by no more than creating an account at blogger.com and spend 10 minutes each day ranting about jobs, neighbor, friend, dog, professors, etc. Yet in a day where a child can pose as a college lecturer, a young man yet to experience puberty can experience the cyber-glamour and attention of his online alter-ego (a beautiful 18 year old female currently studying to be a nurse at UCLA), we still mindlessly (or worse, mindfully) read through articles online and rarely doubt the information contained in each statement. That is the nature of anonymous writing, a paradise-like online space for those craving free expression, a nonexclusive and all-inclusive Internet society that we have termed “Blogosphere.” (A term that would have likely made Wallace wrinkled her nose in distaste…)
“Oh no, Dear Zeyu, I always check my facts!” says the considerate reader. But it is nigh impossible to completely shield oneself from the barrage of false advertisements, sensationalism, half-guessed “research,” and incoherent flames of the average Internet users and publishers. Did the reader check any facts in this article? Of course not, it doesn’t matter if there is a lie or two, it has no effect on anyone’s personal life anyway. But that is exactly why it is so easy to establish a lie as an e-journalist. I am not a junior in EE major. I am a sophomore in Applied Economics and Management, concentrating in Business Finance. I know little to nothing about “signal processing” and “telecommunications,” and in fact the only science class I’ve taken at college is Physics of Musical Sounds. Yet I gained in your mind, hopefully to some degree, a level of authority in the field of electronic communications. Imagine millions of “Electrical Engineers” around the world posting on Wikipedia, on forums, on blogger.com about ideas and concepts that they haven’t a clue about, then you can see the potential Achilles’ Heel in the mighty complex world of online journalism.
1 comment:
You raise a very interesting point that has recently seen a lot of discussion on many tech news sites. Some people are claiming that many bloggers should be considered journalists because of their ability to disseminate current news that is often then assumed “fact” by the readers. Just last month, an article on ABC News reported that “the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have altered policies to indicate they're taking blogs seriously.” This policy change has instigated a revolt by conservative newspaper columnists, such as Robert Novak, who claim that “bloggers simply ‘bloviate’ and don't try to find things out.” I tend to agree with Novak here based on my personal experiences reading blogs. Examples of this are the countless blogs claiming (in 2006) that they had the actual photos of the Apple iPhone before it was even announced. They promised to have had undeniable proof that it was a flip phone, that it had a 60GB hard drive in it, and that it would have a screen on both the front and the back sides. Obviously none of those “facts” were true, but the reality was perhaps that the post was simply a stunt to increase their readership and generate greater ad revenue. For all we know, they could have created the pictures themselves and refrained from posting any concrete links other than something akin to “a Slashdot blog claims that…” which is basically the same thing as saying “we heard it through the grapevine, so it must be true.” Anyway, you wrote a well-written and humorous blog post and I enjoyed your “twist ending.”
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