Week 8

"Journalism is entering a time of crisis" (Bruns,2009). I have to agree with this statement up to a certain level. The society we live in today would prefer to read their daily doze of news on a digitalized form. Yes, there are still people out there who would read the news from the newspaper or other sorts of printed medium. But at least majority of them would prefer the digitalized form. I did not realized it until I've read the article from Johnson. I find how the way citizen journalism works is really fascinating. We as the citizen, choose/decide what news should or should not be published. And most importantly, we play the role of the journalist as well! As Johnson said, we would much rather prefer to find out what a celebrity had for their breakfast than to read about the London riot. Even with that, the breakfast of a celebrity is not even newsworthy, but somehow we find it interesting, and would consider that as news. And hence the term, citizen journalism.



Eventhough Twitter only allows a 140-character word limit, it didn't seem to stop the citizens from sharing the news, instead it has allowed them to keep publishing more and more news, and to have that ability to spread the news world wide is another thing to be amazed by. "The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression." (Johnson, 2009) I wouldn't say that i disagree with this. Personally, the first thing that came through my mind was "how am I supposed to write what's on my mind (was still stuck with the Facebook concept), or even how was it possible for me to deliver a news that was going to be more than that 140-characters?" Then, I slowly learnt that it was more of being able to write a statement than to write a blog-post length of words. It is because of this word limit, news was able to travel so fast from one end to the other. Furthermore, with the hastags, it seem to me that there's a new form of language created. Compare this with the print media, how weird would it be if hastags were to be printed on newspapers? Since the print media is not an interactive platform, citizens would lose their interest in print media, due to the lack of understanding of the news printed. 


"...most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it." (Johnson, 2009) Besides having users constantly inventing new topics with the hastags, Twitter has now in one way or another become the source of information for most people. I could relate to Johnson's saying that if you are seeking a background information of a celebrity, searching it one Google would be the best choice. Whereas if you are wanting to know what he or she did an hour ago, you would be on Twitter for that. Years ago, we used the internet to check our emails in regards to our own personal lives, but now we check our social feed for updates of others' lives. I guess we all have the "ambient awareness", in which we feel satisfy to have a glimpse of others' daily routines. And the best part is, we get the information without asking for it!