A few notable examples of citizen journalism

Cell phone photo of London terrorist attacks in 2005

Trent Lott resigns as Senate majority leader in 2002

Rathergate

Talking Points Memo and the US Attorney Firings and TPM Muckraker

Presidential Debates on the Web

In an interesting collaboration among new (and old) media, Yahoo, Slate magazine (owned by Washington Post), and blogger/citizen journalism supersite The Huffington Post are comming together to host the first ever presidential debates on the web. Sometime after Memorial Day, Democrats and Republicans will take to the web in separate debates in what seems to be something like last night’s Democratic event on MSNBC. Read the Press release from Yahoo.

Validation of the politcal viability of the net? Maybe.
Opportunity for branding coverage of politics on the web? Definitely.

Marx, Engels, Schmidt?

In preparation for an independent study this summer, I’m trying to learn more about Marx’s conception of culture. This is oversimplified, but foundationally Marx argues that our consciousness does not determine our social being, rather our social being, our means of organizing our economic existence, gives rise to and conditions our consciousness, our ideologies, our culture.

In a recent interview, Wired Magazine’s Fred Vogelstein asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt a seemingly simple question. He wanted to know: “How should we think about Google today?”

Schmidt answered:

Think of it first as an advertising system. Then as an end-user system – Google Apps. A third way to think of Google is as a giant supercomputer. And a fourth way is to think of it as a social phenomenon involving the company, the people, the brand, the mission, the values – all that kind of stuff.

Maybe it’s just me trying to create connections between classical theory and this here modern life, but it’s interesting how folks (myself included) like to think about Google first and foremost as a paradigm shifter. After all, “free and accessible information for all” is their corporate ideology. Now we’ve got all the knowledge in the world at our fingertips, information wants to be free, and so on. Yet the man who makes the big decisions says “first we are an advertising system, fourth (not second or third) we are an ideology.”

YouTube Study Complete

This research transformed from a study about YouTube to a study about vlogging (hosted on YouTube). Over 8 weeks, I got to know some vloggers by interviewing and watching their videos, etc. And in the spirit of participant observation, I created some vlogs of my own.

My basic observation is that vlogging is an empowering experience for people who, in the digital age, can now create their own media content and speak to potential mass audiences whereas before, average people were mainly consumers of media. Emancipate the people from the shackles of mainstream media by uploading “football hits man in groin” videos! It’s actually much much more than that. But seeing as how i just wrote 20 pages on it, forgive me for not going into details.

Read the entire paper via the “Vlogging” link at the top of the page. Or click here lazy. Please email me for the password.

YouTube study update

For the past six weeks I’ve been trying to look more closely at vlogging (video web logging) on YouTube – a project for my qualitative methods class. I’ve been watching a lot of vlogs and then starting conversations with some of the people that create them. Some of the folks I contacted didn’t respond, but a good amount of people did. And while some responses were short, sort of courteous replies, others turned into extended correspondence. It’s been great to do this.

The paper is meant to be an ethnography, broadly defined as an interpretative study of a group of people, social practices, and their context. Its due in 10 days and its now clear that it will not read like a traditional ethnographic work, but this project has given me an introduction to a different sort of lens for looking at media. I will post some bits of it, which always works out better when it is written… more about this later.

This is a link to the channel for my YouTube accoun. What’s more exciting than vlogs about vlogs?

Great Web 2.0 video

This is an amazing video about technology and change. And it fits right in line with the ethnography I’m doing on YouTube vloggers, which is coming along. I’m planning to post a version of the study once I complete it.