HW 30: Are All Citizens Publishers and Reporters?

On Friday, November 9th, I attended the Keene State College Citizenship Symposium in the Redfern Arts Center. The session was called “Blogging: Are All Citizens Publishers and Reporters?” The session included Blue Hampshire blogger Michael Caulfield, Keene Sentinel Editor Jim Rousmaniere, and Emile Netzhammer. Sadly, Laura Clawson from the Daily Kos blog did not attend. Unlike the previous session I attended, this session was mainly a discussion. Audience members would ask questions to the speakers, who would take turn answering back. I think the discussion would have much more effective if we were in a smaller area. The main theatre probably holds near a thousand people if I were to guess, but the session only had about forty people attend. Emile Netzhammer opened the session with a technology example of an iPhone he saw on an airplane. This somehow created a segway into the discussion about citizen publishers. The question of should citizens publishers be held accountable for what they publish. In other words, should plagiarism, authenticity, and everything else an author of a book or newspaper goes through be expected from citizen reporters, aka bloggers? The definitive answer given from the panel was “yes, they should.” I tend to disagree with this. I disagree because of the fact that online web logs, known as blogs, are journals that are read by the public. They can be diaries of personal information. One shouldn’t be held accountable because the are writing about their day and use a quote from a movie to describe it without citing the movie. Also, there are 40,000 new blogs every day. Honesty and integrity of work is great, but who is going to sift each blog every day. It simply would take too much time. Blogs aren’t formal, so I think they should not be compared to academic forms of writing. One of the discussion questions that I found most interesting was from a student from the College. She asked where she should find her information, if all the media news is corrupt, such as CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. Michael Caulfield summed it up nicely with this remark. “Honestly, if we were to lose the national media for news, I do not think we would be less informed.” I completely agree with Caulfield on this. We talk in the ITW class often about how the media has biases and agendas, and they do not inform us on what’s really important. Every day I turn on Fox News, I see Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears getting arrested. I do not care about this. If all the news agencies were somehow destroyed, we as Americans would not be hurt in any way.