The Internet and I

For my Introduction to Journalism and Communication course I have to maintain a blog. It's a place where I reflect on my lectures and tutorials as a minimum. I have attempted blogs before but I've always gotten bored with them too quickly. Hopefully the fact that this blog is where all my assessment for the course will be submitted will motivate me to actually write regularly and well.

It's actually already been a few weeks into this course so it looks like I've got some catching up to do. I thought I would start of this semester long party of a blog by reflecting on the internet and it's relation to journalism and communication. In the second week of this semester during my JOUR1111 lecture the topic of Web 2.0 and other web iterations was brought up and discussed with an understanding of what is the internet.

It's too well known just how interconnected human beings are today. Every single day I hear a new mind blowing statistic about just how many facebook users there are or how many years of videos on youtube are being watched every day. Everyone is connected  and it's actually scary just how well the internet can organise itself against someone or something. A few examples are when 4chan rallied an operation against Rebecca Black, recently Anonymous declared a war on religion, and the social media campaign against KONY recently became the most viral video of all time. The largest recent organised protest online was definitely the blackout to campaign against two pieces of legislation, SOPA and PIPA that was threatening to integral structure of how online content was produced. Reddit was at the forefront of the campaign and spearheaded the blackout.

I don't need to explain that the internet has completely changed how we interact with one another. I'm one of those people who uses the internet for almost everything. I primarily use facebook and reddit to entertain and educate myself but I also dabble in 4chan, tumblr, youtube, twitter, wikipedia, rss feeds, podcasts and many other websites. I use Skype to talk to my friends every day in addition to texting and instant messaging on facebook. In fact, Skype is the reason I have most of my best friends today.  I play lots of online games on both my Macbook Pro and my PS3. If I can I will usually try eBay, Amazon or Etsy before going outside and looking for something I want. Basically everything that I do to entertain and improve myself is dependant on a wifi connection. I haven't sat down and watched a television show in almost a year and I cannot remember ever reading a newspaper. I'm not really a big fan of current event news anyway. r/gaming, r/worldnews and r/technology keeps me up to date with everything that would possibly be important to me. Most of the news I read is niche and is related to videogames, movies, television and music. I cannot live without being entertained. In fact the only reason I'm actually writing this right now is because the internet is of something that is of interest to me. It can be really difficult for me to get motivated sometimes.

So how does this relate to Journalism? I actually believe that trained journalism is becoming redundant. It's so easy these days to set up a blog or a website that there's an over saturation of news. Things trend faster on twitter than they can get it onto the 6 o'clock news. The lecturer mentioned something known as a 'citizen journalist' which I believe is evolving the way news is spread. These days people can tweet, post and live stream events as they're occurring and everybody in the first world can have access to the technology to do so. If general people of the public took it upon themselves to go and research and investigate anything, they have the resources to get the story out there immediately.  As long as the internet is accessible, information will be available, discussion will be possible and news will spread.