Blogs vs MSM?
While I turned my back to rush an assignment,this post was causing a stir in blogging circles. The remark that sparked off outrage amongst politically minded bloggers such as Wannabe Lawyer was :
"The final quirk in this is that the bloggers are really not journalists. And so while it is a laudable fight, surely Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières) cannot defend those who do not measure up to the standards of professional journalism. To defend these bloggers as if they had the same standards as a professional journalist is an insult to the industry from which the organization draws its membership."
It was all rather exciting really, what with its comments page being filled with arguments against this disastrous sentiment. Most took umbrage at its placing 'professional journalists' above supposedly amateur bloggers.
I would agree with Wannabe Lawyer and Gilbert Koh's comments on professional journalism not being what it seems. But I would respectfully disagree with the possibility of blogs taking over MSM(mainstream media).
Wannabe lawyer highlighted the fact that a website like Craigslist which generates a gazillion hits everyday and blogs as sounding the death knell for MSM.
I doubt it.
This is my reasoning.( At least listen to me before attcking)To us, the people who can't survive without the Internet, who are used to scanning blogs and online newsites everyday, the mainstream media may seem dispensable. But the reality is that bloggers and their readers belong to a very small sector of society as a whole. Most bloggers and blog readers tend to belong in a specific demographic of fairly young and well educated people. ( Even Mr brown for all his purported 'uncle' claims, isn't actually old at all)
I've been reading blogs for some time now and I realized that at least 75% of blogs I read were written by either university students or university graduates. The blogging community itself, tends to be confined to those with a bent for reading and writing which also a small percentage of the tertiary educated demographic. ( For the purposes of this post, I would include polytechnics within this category not only because they're tertiary institutions but also because I sincerely believe that the wider society underestimates poly grads)
We forget, as many educated people do, the rest of the teeming population out there who do not have the time, education or inclination to read blogs. We also forget that they make up the majority of the population, not the minority.
It is true that not all blogs or bloggers fall within this narrowly constructed demographic. But I believe it is safe to say that a very large percentage of them do.
When I was in NUS one of the courses I took studied the socio-political impact of the Internet in general.Most people wanted to believe that because of the promise of anonymity , the Internet would usher in a new age of democracy, where everyone could finally get their voice heard. In the end the articles I read debunked this myth effectively.
The truth is that when it was really studied, most people tended to zoom in on sites whose name they recognized and were familiar with. This included mainstream newsites and the shopping sites of big named departmental stores. In the online world as in the offline one, big names dominate.
There are enormous sectors of the population who would never be comfortable with the Internet simply because they weren't brought up with it. I would say not many of us have parents who read blogs or write blogs. For the older generation( some of whom might even be illiterate), there is only the mainstream media because the Internet is a foreign land to them.Needless to say, those who live below or near the poverty line would not even have Internet access, nevermind about reading blogs. The Internet can marginalize just as much as it helps certain marginalized groups speak out.
Aside from obvious demographic issues, there is the fact that we look for the same things online that we look for in real life. The religious minded will surf religious websites and set up their own religious websites, the politically minded would look for sites like Thinkcentre or read blogs like Wannabe Lawyer and Singabloodypore.Those with a wider range of interests will naturally seek out a wider range of websites which will reflect their spectrum of interests.
The difference between the internet and MSM is that online, you have to actively seek out the sites you're interested in. Flipping through a newspaper or watching TV will bring other things to your attention, even while reading/watching things you're primarily interested in.
It is true that the internet allows a proliferation of publications and online stores that would otherwise have never existed. But the people who search them out belong to a minority rather than a majority. And those who search them out would most likely be people who already had an interest in them to begin with.
This is not to downplay the role of blogs in anyway. As demonstrated by the whole Acidflask debacle, blogs can be like the mythical Hydra, unstoppable because of its ability to grow two more heads where one was chopped off.
Just because one blog was sued, twenty more blogs wrote about it and spread the word.(Plus they got to it before the mainstream media did too! )But I would also say that there would be many whose first inkling of the debacle would be through some sanitised and biased article in one of Singapore's newspapers.
I do not believe that professional journalists are any better than many of the bloggers out there.Singaporean media especially can never claim any form of neutrality or even any professional standards, it seems. But one has to admit that they have a tad more credibility than some bloggers( the racist scholar incident comes to mind). And it is true that journalists muck up just as much or even more than some bloggers.
But blogs, like the rest of the Internet, reflect the world we live in. Just as there are intelligent, thoughtfully written blogs like Singapore Angle or MrBrown, there will also be blogs out there with completely inane and facile posts which cannot hope to measure up to even the crappiest tabloids in terms of writing and thought.Perhaps these blogs will never get Tomorrowed or Browned or merit a mention in MSM, but they will exist never theless, and will have their own limited audience.
I'm not trying to shoot down blogs. I'm an inveterate blog reader myself. But one has to try to be fair and give the devil its due. MSM reaches people that blogs( in this point of time anyway) can't. Not yet at least.
"The final quirk in this is that the bloggers are really not journalists. And so while it is a laudable fight, surely Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières) cannot defend those who do not measure up to the standards of professional journalism. To defend these bloggers as if they had the same standards as a professional journalist is an insult to the industry from which the organization draws its membership."
It was all rather exciting really, what with its comments page being filled with arguments against this disastrous sentiment. Most took umbrage at its placing 'professional journalists' above supposedly amateur bloggers.
I would agree with Wannabe Lawyer and Gilbert Koh's comments on professional journalism not being what it seems. But I would respectfully disagree with the possibility of blogs taking over MSM(mainstream media).
Wannabe lawyer highlighted the fact that a website like Craigslist which generates a gazillion hits everyday and blogs as sounding the death knell for MSM.
I doubt it.
This is my reasoning.( At least listen to me before attcking)To us, the people who can't survive without the Internet, who are used to scanning blogs and online newsites everyday, the mainstream media may seem dispensable. But the reality is that bloggers and their readers belong to a very small sector of society as a whole. Most bloggers and blog readers tend to belong in a specific demographic of fairly young and well educated people. ( Even Mr brown for all his purported 'uncle' claims, isn't actually old at all)
I've been reading blogs for some time now and I realized that at least 75% of blogs I read were written by either university students or university graduates. The blogging community itself, tends to be confined to those with a bent for reading and writing which also a small percentage of the tertiary educated demographic. ( For the purposes of this post, I would include polytechnics within this category not only because they're tertiary institutions but also because I sincerely believe that the wider society underestimates poly grads)
We forget, as many educated people do, the rest of the teeming population out there who do not have the time, education or inclination to read blogs. We also forget that they make up the majority of the population, not the minority.
It is true that not all blogs or bloggers fall within this narrowly constructed demographic. But I believe it is safe to say that a very large percentage of them do.
When I was in NUS one of the courses I took studied the socio-political impact of the Internet in general.Most people wanted to believe that because of the promise of anonymity , the Internet would usher in a new age of democracy, where everyone could finally get their voice heard. In the end the articles I read debunked this myth effectively.
The truth is that when it was really studied, most people tended to zoom in on sites whose name they recognized and were familiar with. This included mainstream newsites and the shopping sites of big named departmental stores. In the online world as in the offline one, big names dominate.
There are enormous sectors of the population who would never be comfortable with the Internet simply because they weren't brought up with it. I would say not many of us have parents who read blogs or write blogs. For the older generation( some of whom might even be illiterate), there is only the mainstream media because the Internet is a foreign land to them.Needless to say, those who live below or near the poverty line would not even have Internet access, nevermind about reading blogs. The Internet can marginalize just as much as it helps certain marginalized groups speak out.
Aside from obvious demographic issues, there is the fact that we look for the same things online that we look for in real life. The religious minded will surf religious websites and set up their own religious websites, the politically minded would look for sites like Thinkcentre or read blogs like Wannabe Lawyer and Singabloodypore.Those with a wider range of interests will naturally seek out a wider range of websites which will reflect their spectrum of interests.
The difference between the internet and MSM is that online, you have to actively seek out the sites you're interested in. Flipping through a newspaper or watching TV will bring other things to your attention, even while reading/watching things you're primarily interested in.
It is true that the internet allows a proliferation of publications and online stores that would otherwise have never existed. But the people who search them out belong to a minority rather than a majority. And those who search them out would most likely be people who already had an interest in them to begin with.
This is not to downplay the role of blogs in anyway. As demonstrated by the whole Acidflask debacle, blogs can be like the mythical Hydra, unstoppable because of its ability to grow two more heads where one was chopped off.
Just because one blog was sued, twenty more blogs wrote about it and spread the word.(Plus they got to it before the mainstream media did too! )But I would also say that there would be many whose first inkling of the debacle would be through some sanitised and biased article in one of Singapore's newspapers.
I do not believe that professional journalists are any better than many of the bloggers out there.Singaporean media especially can never claim any form of neutrality or even any professional standards, it seems. But one has to admit that they have a tad more credibility than some bloggers( the racist scholar incident comes to mind). And it is true that journalists muck up just as much or even more than some bloggers.
But blogs, like the rest of the Internet, reflect the world we live in. Just as there are intelligent, thoughtfully written blogs like Singapore Angle or MrBrown, there will also be blogs out there with completely inane and facile posts which cannot hope to measure up to even the crappiest tabloids in terms of writing and thought.Perhaps these blogs will never get Tomorrowed or Browned or merit a mention in MSM, but they will exist never theless, and will have their own limited audience.
I'm not trying to shoot down blogs. I'm an inveterate blog reader myself. But one has to try to be fair and give the devil its due. MSM reaches people that blogs( in this point of time anyway) can't. Not yet at least.
posted by adinahaes at 3:36 AM
1 Comments:
Trackback: From a Singapore Angle, "Blogs and/or MSM?"
PS: Nice detailed post. The point about the blogging/blog reading demographics is most apropos--and contrasts somewhat with the situation, say, in the US. But give it another decade the current set will have graduated into 'mainstream working life' and the scene may well undergo a seachange.
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