Mod. 6.1 - More Than Words Can Say...

First Reading:
Walker, J. (2005). Mirrors and Shadows: The Digital Aestheticisation of Oneself. Paper presented at the Digital Arts and Culture Conference. 


An image and/or graphic representation of any kind that represents a person in this environment is referred to as an 'avatar'. The term avatar comes to use from the Hindu religion and the sanskrit word meaning, approximately, "incarnation".

Translation: 'quotidian practice' = daily practice

'In this paper I will explore how and why we have turned our digital eye inward. Why does digital technology seem to encourage us to portray ourselves rather than sticking to representing the world around us as we used to do? What kinds of self-portraits are we seeing? What might our digital desire to aestheticise ourselves mean?'
Comment: I think the answer has already been given: Because digital photography makes it easier to portrait yourself. Technology makes it possible to take a digital photo, which is an instant image that can be viewed as quickly as it can be deleted. Further, no third parties are involved in the process of developing the picture. It is in the hands of the self portraier to either accept or reject the picture. Deleting can be done before anybody else will be able to view the photograph. This experience is much more a private undertaking as traditional photography which requires the exposaed negative film to be developed and then to take positive prints of the film to finally see the outcome. The self portraiter takes control what is distributed and what's kept private. Further, with digital photography, the number of shots is not limited to the length of the film (usually 36 negatives) . Instead the storage device limits the shots. This could actually be a few thousand, without having to transfer the shots to an external storage device, outside the camera. It's all in the hands of the user.

'We’re not simply interested in presenting an image, we’re creating versions of ourselves. In a study of teenaged girls and their use of visual chat rooms, Angela Thomas found that the girls not only tended to have more than one avatar, they were deeply invested in their different self-presentations. Thomas
quotes one of her informants, Christy, talking about the sexy avatar she has chosen for herself: “i look at her more than who i am speaking to sometimes lol!!” '

Comment: Another fact is that girls are more alert about looking their best, being constantly pushed to the limits by advertising, gossip magazines, fashion, diets etc. So as a result I can imagine that most women are not happy with themselves and feel that they have to lie about themselves to be more appealing. Which is actually confirmed on page three:
'When I attempt to create a self-portrait of myself in storTrooper (see Figure 2) I cannot help but misrecognise myself. Yes, the hair colour is mine, so, more or less, is the style, and the clothes are similar to clothes I own. I recognise myself, and I also see it as a stylised, picture perfect version
of me. It would never have holes in its socks or forget to put on mascara. It is as illusory as the digitally retouched photograph of a fashion model.'
Comment: Perfection matters...


'In the seventies, feminist critic Laura Mulvey argued that the cinematic gaze tends to objectify the people it portrays. Mulvey was writing within a staunchly psychoanalytical tradition that assumes that the patriarchy sees women first and foremost as castrated men, and men need women to lack a phallus in order to confirm their masculinity, and so her essay discusses how the camera often functions as a “male” gaze that objectifies women. Women spectators, in Mulvey’s view, also assume the position of that gaze [11].'
Comment: Oh yes, and all men are potential rapists, trying to suppress the female, rah-rah-rah. I'm so happy the 70s are over and women don't define themselves anymore by doing exactly the same with men what men did to them. But that's a different story.

Parmigianino's self-portrait: Self-portrait in a convex Mirror 1523/1524

'Pornography of the Playboy variety is of course an extreme example of the male gaze objectifying women, which Mulvey claims occurs to some extent whenever anyone picks up a camera. By combining large groups of such images, Salavon emphasises their formulaic nature, obliterating the individuality of each woman.'

Comment: It reveals a lot about Ms Walker when she mistakes the female act as pornography. Just because it is the centrefold in Playboy it is NOT pornography. Pornography by legal definition is the portrayal of sexual acts solely for the purpose of sexual arousal. Lying around naked is not exactly a sexual act...


Page 6: 'Blogs that stick to discussion of topics outside of personal, day to day experience can have a
similarly self-reflective function, as Rebecca Blood, a pioneer blogger wrote in an early essay on blogs:
Shortly after I began producing Rebecca’s Pocket I noticed two side effects I had not expected. First, I
discovered my own interests. I thought I knew what I was interested in, but after linking stories for a few months I could see that I was much more interested in science, archaeology, and issues of injustice than I had realized. More importantly, I began to value more highly my own point of view. In composing my link text every day I carefully considered my own opinions and ideas, and I began to feel that my perspective was unique and important. [1]'

'Most scholars have compared weblogs to recent diary-writing [8], they’ve taken an ethnographical approach or discussed blogs in terms of education, marketing or other practical matters.'


Comment: I don't share this notion that a diary and a weblog can be compared. I would never share a diary with anyone but myself. A dieary is a dialogue with oneself, not an expression of oneself to the world.

Second Reading: 
The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction
Kristine L. Nowak, Christian Rauh
Department of Communication Science University of Connecticut

Not read yet... 

Mod. 5.1 - Links

Discussion: Noor F. Ali-Hasan/Lada A. Adamic - Expressing Social Relationships on the Blog through Links and Comments (2007)
Abbreviation: computer-mediated communication (CMC)

'Bloggers tend to frequent the same blogs and build relationships with bloggers that share similar interests [13]. These cliques are often referred to as blogospheres, sets of highly linked and intertwined blogs.'

Abbreviation: computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW)


'Of the motivations for keeping a blog, it was found that three of them (“update others on activities and whereabouts[,] express opinions to influence others[, and] seek others‟ opinions and feedback”) involved communicating with others. They also found that communication sometimes extends to other media, including email, instant messaging, and face-to-face conversation.'

Explanatory remarks:
'Social relationships can be expressed online as different forms of blog ties:

Blogroll links are usually located in the blog‟s sidebar and point to other blogs that the author may read or simply want to always include on her main page.

Citation links are made by bloggers within their own posts and can reference an entire blog or just a particular post on that blog. By their nature, they occur at a fixed time point, but may be repeated. Repeated citations can serve as a weight for the tie – with more frequent citations indicating a greater interest of one blog for another.

Comment links are not necessarily hyperlinks per se, but an interaction that occurs when one person, possibly a blogger, adds a comment to another blogger‟s post.

For both blogrolls and citations, the communication is indirect. It occurs on the blog with the blogroll or citing blog post, but may be noticed by the blog being referenced through blog search engines, server logs, or through TrackBacks. Trackbacks allow the citing blog to notify the blog receiving the citation that their post has been discussed [4]. The receiving blog will typically display the TrackBack, along with summary text of the citing post. Readers are then able to follow conversations across several blogs by traversing TrackBacks.'


'...we observe that bloggers receiving many comments will comment on their own post in reply to others‟ comments.'

'Overall, we see a country-level affinity of the blogs. The 5 most blogrolled blogs for all three communities are blogs from the respective countries. But for the DFW blogs, all (dooce.com, michellemalkin.com, powerlineblog.com, captainsquartersblog.com) but the last of the top 5 blogs are A-list blogs in the United States that are outside of Dallas/Fort Worth . DFW blogs also have the highest percentage of blogroll links to blogs outside of their community (91%), while Kuwait has the lowest (53%). These community statistics are reflected in Figure 3, showing blogroll networks including external blogs linked to by blogs from within the community.'

Comment on the above: I don't regard these results as surprising. While Kuwait is a country in itself without different states, Dallas/Fort Worth are cities in Texas which again is a United State of America. The UAE is a federation of different emirates. It would be interesting to know what the authors regard as the community in Kuwait and what they regard the community in the UAE. E.g. would a place outside Dubai be outside the community? Kuwait again is the only city in a country as big as Denmark, what is regarded outside the community there, compared to the explanation for Dallas/Fort Worth?

Survey results, asking the motivation behind blogging for the above three communities: The most popular choice across communities actually was... the simple desire to express oneself through blogging.

'While DFW bloggers may have been less motivated to find new friends, they were twice as likely to be interested in maintaining existing relationships with friends and family through blogging (46%), than either the Kuwait (26%) or UAE bloggers (23%) (p < 0.05). One blogger from Dallas/Fort Worth shared her enthusiasm for keeping in touch through blogs:
I wish everybody would blog. It's such an easy way of
knowing what's up in someone's life and what thoughts
are on their mind, important or not. People often think,
'Oh, nobody'd want to read about /my/ boring life,' but
really, sometimes just seeing the world from someone
else's point of view can be fascinating.'

I dont find this finding surprising either. The conception of the self in Arabian countries is different from the US, which should have significantly different influence on the way people maintain relations in these countries.

'Furthermore, in the case of Kuwait and UAE bloggers, many blog anonymously by using a pseudonym, and so are potentially able to keep their real-world and blogging interactions separate. This also correlates with our earlier mentioned finding that UAE and Kuwait bloggers were less interested in blogging to share news
with friends and family.'

Again, being part of a conservative social community in Real Life, blogging anonymously might be a great opportunity to freely express oneself, without fearing suppression or rejection.

Translation: Reciprocity - Wechselseitigeit

Discussion: Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up" (2005)
Susan C. Herring, Inna Kouper, John C. Paolillo, Lois Ann Scheidt,
Michael Tyworth, Peter Welsch, Elijah Wright, and Ning Yu
School of Library and Information Science
Indiana University Bloomington

'We use 'A-list' as an operational shorthand to refer to the most popular blogs as determined by number of inbound links, a practice that also underlies the identification of "top-100" lists of blogs posted to the web. Some bloggers dislike this term, perhaps because of its implied elitism.'

Abbreviation: Social network analysis (SNA)

'The small world phenomenon, initially described by Milgram (1967), is a condition of interconnectedness in the real world whereby two random U.S. citizens were found to be connected by an average of six acquaintances.'

This phenomenon is not restricted to the US. It works all over the world.





How to get a meaningful A-list of blogs:

‘Top 100 lists, however, calculate the number of inbound links by disparate means (see 2.2.), and thus their contents differ. To get as accurate a list of A-list blogs as possible, we generated a composite ranking derived from the NITLE Blog Census, the Technorati Top 100, and the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem. Blogs that appeared in any two of the three ranking systems and were ranked in the top 100 of their system were included in the composite A-list measure. The original ranking from each system was noted for each blog. For blogs appearing in two of the ranking systems but not the third, a third, arbitrary ranking of 114 was entered, and the three rankings were averaged. This was done to weight in favor of those blogs that appeared in all three ranking systems. This method resulted in a composite list, independent of the list of blogs generated as described above, of 45 ranked unique URLs.’

‘To create the visualizations, the Pajek visualization tool was used (http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/), together with the Kamada-Kawai energy algorithm for the lay out.’

‘It is notable that in no case did a blog reference another blog only once—all the pairs that engaged in reciprocal referencing did so on multiple occasions, suggesting the existence of a relationship between them, not just a one-time exchange. These findings support the existence of interconnection and conversation in the blogosphere.’

‘Yet only about one-quarter of all initially randomly-generated blogs were found to have any outbound links to other blogs. Including inbound links raises the percentage of random blogs connected in some way to other blogs to 58%,7 but that still leaves 42% of the blogs tracked by blo.gs that appear to be social isolates, neither linking to nor being linked to by others.’

‘The blogosphere appears to be selectively interconnected, with dense clusters in parts, and blogs minimally connected in local neighborhoods, or free-floating individually, constituting the majority. Moreover, it seems likely that the much-touted textual conversation that all of the blogosphere is supposed to be engaged in involves a minority of blogs as well, and sporadic activity even among those blogs (for example, no dyads interacted publicly on theirblogs every day, similar to the finding of Kumar, et al., 2003 that interactions among blogs are "bursty").

‘Future directions
The analysis reported in this study was carried out on a sample of 5,517 weblogs that were manually identified by following hyperlinks from four random blogs. It was not our original intention to collect the blogs manually, as identification is tedious, but we encountered difficulties with the several blog identification algorithms we tried to use, all of which had unacceptably high rates of error. One of our future goals is to refine one of these algorithms to reduce the rate of error sufficiently so that much larger samples can be generated from random blogs, at further degrees of separation. The present analysis is proof of the concept, and succeeded in identifying patterns that would not have emerged as readily by other means, e.g., the Catholic and homeschooling blog cliques; it further revealed their network configurations and their relationships to A-list blogs. We hope to produce a more complete mapping of such topical communities when we are able to generate larger sample blogospheres from the bottom up, and/or to generate multiple local blogospheres from individual random source blogs. Simultaneously, we are directing efforts toward devising methods of sampling, analysis, and visualization that will render apparent patterns involving less-connected blogs.’

Mod. 4.2 - A New Media Audience

Readings:
Shirky:Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality

Comments:
This reading is from a mailing list back in 2003. It is important to take into account that this is seven years ago. As a result, the statement
'A persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world.'
is certainly outdated. My experience tells me that there are bloggers all over the world who contribute to all sorts of different aspects in today's society, among them a large number of journalists as well as people genuinly interested in certain subjects and contributing regularely to a world wide discussion.

'The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.'


This is a more general view that I can claerly agree to.

In terms of the power law distribution dogma, as I would like to call it, the more important question to me is, what I would like to achieve with my blog. Do I want to be famous (as many readers as possible) or do I want to contribute my time and effort to a subject that I regard as important (share with people interested ina specific subject)? If the latter is the case, then popularity doesn't have any meaning to me.

From what I understand, the top ranks are about popularity. The higher the numbers the more generic the content as it compliments mass appeal.

' It's not impossible to launch a good new blog and become widely read, but it's harder than it was last year, and it will be harder still next year.' 

Again, this in my view is not the most important aspact of writing a blog. If you want to share information ranking is not important. Accuracy comes before popularity.

Mod. 4.1 -The Attention Economy

1. Reading: Shirky, C. (2002). Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing.


Writer Kevin Kelly has suggested that those publishing in a new media environment need to consider intangible value that can be added to information. He terms these elements "generative value":

"A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold." (Kelly, 2009)

Kelly's eight ways to add generative value to information in order that it becomes more viable as a commercial offering:

Immediacy
Although information is increasingly easy to access, it is often the case that timeliness can add significant value to your work. The first review of a highly-anticipated product will be far more popular than the 100th. One way of gaining relevance for your audience is to respond to developments in your area quickly.

Personalisation
The idea of personalisation is one that we have explored in the earlier weeks of this unit, if not explicitly. By focusing on a particular group with particular interests, it is possible to create content with specifically that audience in mind. Kelly extends this idea to all types of media and forms of distribution, suggesting that personalising content creates a two-way relationship that an audience is often reluctant to break.

Interpretation
Discussing interpretation, Kelly points to open source software models where the software itself is free but manual and support come at a price. The same idea can be applied to specialist writing. If you understand and can explain something in a way that simplifies it for your audience, you have created value.

Authenticity
In the age of infinite replicability, what does it mean to hold a copy of the real thing™ in your hands? By offering audiences and consumers a seal of authenticity that tells them this is an original work from the author, we can add a value to a product.

Accessibility
Although we have become accustomed to thinking of the Web as being located on our personal computers, the increasing rise in mobile Internet devices such as phones and PDAs, along with a growing reliance on these devices to serve up media means that consumers are less concerned about 'owning' media as they are in having easy and flexible access to it.

Embodiment
As much information and writing as there is on the Web, there is something attractive about the tactile nature of a book. A number of bloggers have turned their work into published books. Similarly, although digitally stored music and video are convenient, physical media remain popular.

Patronage
Kelly has famously proposed the notion of "1,000 true fans". As he points out, there are many examples of audiences paying for content voluntarily - particularly when they know that the creator will benefit directly. Given a convenient and direct opportunity, audiences are happy to pay artists and creators they truly want to support.

Findability
As Kelly points out, even a free text has no value if no-one can find it! You need to make sure that your work is made available to people who might be interested in it. Perhaps the most obvious way of doing this for an independent publisher/creator is to nurture links with other writers who are working within the same area and to make yourself visible to the niche audience you are catering to.

Readings
Comments on Clay Shirkeys blog, 'Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing'

'Weblogs are not a new kind of publishing that requires a new system of financial reward. Instead, weblogs mark a radical break. They are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity.'

Comment: Interestingly, I read somewhere that this also is the case with music. Publishing music on the Internet also requires a new system of financial reward - in terms of music the solution is branding.
(make reference in the discussion board and use what I wrote about Dick Dale and The 
 
 2. Rading: Anderson, C. (2004). The Long Tail.


Interestingly Anderson confirms what I always thought - that major publishers of music and books simply tried to dictate a mainstream taste by overriding everything else available with ubiquitous marketing and advertising out of economic reasoning. There always has been the so called underground, but with online media the undferground is much easier accessible and people will find out that there is an almost infinite variety of interesting material that might attract them.

This is only possible because the regime of distribution and sales numbers does not exist in a virtual world.

Interesting remark:
'The other constraint of the physical world is physics itself. The radio spectrum can carry only so many stations, and a coaxial cable so many TV channels. And, of course, there are only 24 hours a day of programming. The curse of broadcast technologies is that they are profligate users of limited resources. The result is yet another instance of having to aggregate large audiences in one geographic area - another high bar, above which only a fraction of potential content rises.'

...and referring to digital jukeboxes:
'With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.'


...and referring to CDs with a hit and otherwise crap:
'There's also a lot of crap. But there's a lot of crap hiding between the radio tracks on hit albums, too. People have to skip over it on CDs, but they can more easily avoid it online, since the collaborative filters typically won't steer you to it. Unlike the CD, where each crap track costs perhaps one-twelfth of a $15 album price, online it just sits harmlessly on some server, ignored in a market that sells by the song and evaluates tracks on their own merit.'

In general The Long tail asks the reader to rethink the concept of hits and bestsellers in the aim to browse for the really interesting stuff that usually falls beyond awareness of the consumer. In the virtual world all titles can be made easily accessible as they do not require shelf space and they are available 24/7 on top. As a result, online suppliers make more money out of the unnkown than traditional stores do with their limited shelf space.

Here is a link to Netflix:

3.Reading Kelly, C. (2008). Better Than Free.

As we've learned before, publishings as such are worthless as they are no longer limited to the number of issues in a physical edition. There are large numbers of copies produced on the Internet.

What cannot be copied are human qualities like trust. Looking at them from the user perspective makes it easier to understand the value. The qualities in detail are already discussed above in the first reading.
However, what is important is, that 'the money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies. Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits' (Kelly, 2008)



Reference

Kelly, K. (2008). Better Than Free. Retrieved October 24th, 2009, from http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html.

Mod 3.1: Narrating Personal Interest (Writing Task)

In my first ever job in Australia I worked as a casual lecturer for a private education institute in the Melbourne CBD. Most of the students were from India and China. Naïve as I was, I thought these students were there to learn about printing, pre-press and multimedia. The conditions and the learning material provided were next to non-existent. I had to come up with all the teaching material by myself, which made me stay up weeknights until 2 am and work on weekends to keep up with the class schedule.

I was frustrated with the institute and how students and employees were treated, so I went to see the manager and told him about my concerns. He replied quite honestly that it’s all about money, which confirmed what one of his recruiting agents, responsible for recruiting Indian students, had already told me.

I talked to the students about the situation, but they seemed to be fine with it. All they wanted was a Certificate IV in printing; the requirement for Permanent Residency (PR). The institute guaranteed a successful graduation and only one of the students I knew seemed to be keen to actually work in this profession in Australia.

Later that year both Government and the Department of Immigration and Internal Affairs (DIMIA) became aware of the exploitation of mainly Indian and Chinese students. The institute I worked for was amongst the first to be shut down later that year. But having paid lots of money for their courses, the situation for students only got worse as they were left in limbo, Unable to finish their courses. Finally other private institutes that were not affected by the closures took them in.

Certainly, things have changed since then. DIMIA has come up with an additional set of regulations, many privately run education institutes, also nicknamed visa factories, have been shut down and it is much harder for foreign students to study in Australia.

Since January 2009 I work at Careers & Employment, a unit of the department of student services at Swinburne University. We run our own job-database and have direct dealings with other student services like Housing and Finance. Digging myself in, trying to overlook the complexity of the entire issue about the welfare of international students in Australia, I realized that there is more than meets the eye. I think it’s important to make transparent how many faces the problem actually has. Be it jobs, accommodation, education, or immigration – international students are still disadvantaged, left alone or treated badly.

3.1 - Discussion Board Contribution

· In what way do you see the function of traditional mass-media and so-called personal media as being different?

I believe that the function of traditional mass-media nowadays is to influence the masses rather than to inform them. There was an interesting interview on the 7.30 report tonight (12/10/2010), Kerry O’Brien interviewing Bruce Guthrie, who will release his book Man Bites Murdoch tomorrow. Guthrie made an interesting remark about the development of newspapers since the early seventies. He said that in those days, the role of the editor was simply to hunt down great stories and make them available to the masses. In today’s times everybody seems to try and take influence on what is published and how it is presented. Shareholders, Politicians, Industry all want to control - especially what is said about them and their peers and how that affects the public view. He further stated that this makes the position of the editor extremely difficult, as he has to constantly avoid accidentally stepping on somebody’s foot. An extract of Man Bites Murdoch is available on The Age’s website.

I believe that there are parallels in other traditional mass-media apart from print, like Radio and TV. They all have a one-to-many approach in common trying to control the audience by controlling what is published.

So-called personal-media is a many-to-many scenario, providing opportunities for dialogue. Traditional mass-media only allows for a monologue from the media to the masses.

Visualising traditional mass-media versus so-called personal-media, there are to levels. Traditional mass-media is on the limited space of an upper level, in a hierarchical position. Traditional mass-media communicates vertically, top down, one way.. To the contrary, so-called personal-media actually comprises the lower level. Communication commences horizontally between individuals that make up the masses to the effect that news (information) spreads virally: Individuals forward information to multiple recipients who then again individually spread the information to multiple recipients.

· In what way do you see the form of traditional mass-media and so-called personal media as being different?

My experience is that traditional mass-media and so-called personal-media are starting to interact. While so-called personal-media will approach traditional media to further popularise their offers, traditional mass media has discovered the virtual world of so-called personal-media for their own purposes. The borders are blurring.

Traditional mass media had to rely on physical data media like paper (books, newspapers, magazines) and radio waves (TV and radio).

So-called personal-media almost entirely relies on the Web. What traditional mass media required in physical means of transport, the Web can combine in a virtual environment that is accessible 24/7 and branching out into all sorts of Internet enabled devices outside standard computers and laptops, such as mobile phones and Blackberries. Further, replicating of information can commence infinitely, while physical replication always comes at a cost. This doesn’t only make so-called personal-media more flexible, it also comes at significantly lower costs.

· In what way do you see the reliability of traditional mass-media and so-called personal media as being different?

Looking at this question I also wonder how important reliability is. I would say it depends on how valuable the information is and how it impacts on the receiver. Women’s Weekly are traditional mass-media, as are Channel 9 News updates, Kyle Sandilands’ radio show, as well as newspapers like The Australian or Herald Sun. A significant part of what is sold as news is actually trivia. Is it important that the information is reliable when celebrity A has been divorced from celebrity B, or that C was seen drunk and embarrassed D with it or that E has put on some weight?

In my opinion reliability is important when the information provided affects the consumer directly. I will further discuss the reliability issue from this point of view.

As stated above, traditional mass-media and so-called personal-media are starting to interact. Both cite each other (e.g. newspapers, TV and radio report on blogs, vodcasts etc. and vice versa) and traditional mass-media also starts to use the means of so-called personal-media communication. A good example is ABC TV which uses the means of Internet communication to promote their programs online. The political program Q&A offers viewers (the masses in front of their TV) to ask questions to the panel through vodcasts and to comment on the show via Twitter. Randomly tweets are faded in during the program.

To be accepted as a reliable source of information I believe that traditional media will have to move away from the hierarchical communication position as outlined in the response to question 1 and get on the same level with the masses. I think that ABC is a great role model on how to transition from vertical one way communication and taking the risk of engaging in many-to-many horizontal communication, arriving on the same level with the audience.

I do tend to believe that so-called personal-media is more reliable than mass media, the reason being that you have a personal relation with your audience, based on two-way communication. Interacting in two-way communication is more risky than simply talking at the masses.

All individuals in a so-called personal-media CME interact. Statements can be questioned or even dismissed directly and in person. But they can also spark new discussion. So-called personal-media relations demand accountability in the aim to gain trust in what you communicate. In traditional mass-media trust was out of the question as there were no alternatives than what traditional mass-media would actually deliver to the masses. Everybody had the same information and if the information was questioned it again happened through traditional mass-media.

Further response to Sky's question:

Hello Sky,

It’s interesting that you ask this. I totally agree that we should be abandoning some of our mistrust of sources that aren't affiliated with large organisations, and instead put more value on sources that are aware of local issues that affect us directly.

From a traditional perspective, I think it is a habit to believe that information provided by large organizations is generally of better quality than less common sources. Consuming information was a passive experience. How could consumers find out if they were told the truth? It was almost impossible, as distribution was in the hands of the traditional media. There was no alternative. As a result, the consumer was also easy to manipulate. There is a great example from 1977 when an investigative journalist (Wallraff, 1997) worked undercover for three and a half months as an editor at Germany’s biggest newspaper (Bild ). Soon after his experience, he published a book, which became an instant bestseller, followed by a number of charges and counter charges between Bild and Wallraff, as Wallraff had badly damaged the reputation of the newspaper.

I think that so-called personal media consists partly of people like Guenther Wallraff. Today they still engage in investigative journalism, but instead of working undercover, the Internet provides the technology to simply interact with those who are aware of local issues and can either confirm information as accurate or reject it as incorrect. That is why I believe that consumers should put more value on these sources. I’m not saying that I categorically reject anything that is provided by large organizations. What I think is important is that consumers should not always accept simple answers to complex questions and use the means that are available to do their own research and use some local sources to confirm what they’ve been told – especially when it affects them directly.

References

Wallraff, G. (1977). Der Aufmacher: Der Mann, der bei Bild Hans Esser war. Cologne, Germany, Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co KG