The Internet for myself is a wonderful thing, but my biggest criticism with it is the lack of trust I can find in it.
For open news or open publishing websites it is impossible to know where your information is coming from.
As considered in Meikle's writing, even if what we find on the Internet is true, how can we accept it if it is biased? Many open news stories may have been posted or adapted by someone whose beliefs are strong and very one-sided.
Meikle looks at Indymedia.com and acknowledges that although advertised as an "open publishing" website, Indymedia have had to secure their home page so as to gain more readers, proving that most users will only accept secure and legitimate news websites.
Does this example therefore answer the question of open news and its quality? To an extent, yes, how can it possibly be reliable when written by, well, who knows!?
In the lecture the collaborative content of Wikis was addressed. Wikitravel, Wikibooks, Wikipedia and many more are websites owned by no-one, allowing any user to contribute. While an excellent form of free Internet and a perfect way to express oneself, it is also an unreliable source of information.
We as students are encouraged to use sites such as Wikipedia but we are not to use them in essays or if quoting as it is impossible to tell where the information has derived from.
Acknowledging this, surely the open news websites are equally unreliable and therefore the quality of them is poor.
It in unsurprising that we as a society turn to genuine, legitimate sites to get our news. Is this unfair to open news sites, should we be giving them a chance? Or can we just not trust them?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Do you think that we can't trust the internet because there is no history to it? Like televisions, most people have grown up with it and therefore don't question the messages given from it, even though sometimes the news is highly biased? It's hard to trust new sites even though they could be telling the truth, because we have a lack of knowledge about them. In the writings we have been described as the 'blank generation' and we have the ability to create and become produsers, I don't think this is entirely true though. We are from the blank generation and are still having trouble accepting the messages from the internet, do you think having power within these mediums is scary for the audience because they don't really have much power in other media?
ReplyDeleteYes I agree with you Claire. We are still adjusting to the Internet and therefore as a society we find it hard to trust it. Especially with all the negative media attention it does get.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that suddenly we as produsers can be whoever we want to be. How can we all be journalists, as stated by Indymedia, when some people have no skill in writing?
I do think that one of the issues is that we are given a lot of freedom with the Internet, freedom which we perhaps never had before and that makes us wary of it.
claire you said we cant trust the inet because it has no history. the inet has been around or many years - longer thn we even thought. i know it has bad press at times but i don't understand wy you wouldnt trust it???
ReplyDeleteYes for us it's been round quite a while, but for our parents it hasnt really because they grew up with the radio and the television, and the power the audience csn get from the internet is still developing and this could be the reason for why people don't trust it?
ReplyDelete