The Real News, Indymedia and BBC

The Real News

*No advertising, government or corporate funding
*Split news by country and by topic
*Very politically based

Indymedia

*Decribed as a "network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues."
*The entire website is therefore based on stories from locals and not media companies

BBC

*Website mainly based on stories from the UK (showed on homepage) although there are categories for other countries  

Dan Gillmor - We The Media

"We Media is all media that is 'homegrown', local, organic and potentially counter-cultural"

IDEOLOGY (ideas of the rulers) passed down through HEGEMONY; (parents, education, media, culture)
*IT IS A REINFORCEMENT OF IDEAS*

Key Ideas;
         *Being a citizen has to be learned or developed
         *The 'Big Media' (news corps, CNN, BBC etc) have controlled who gets to produce and share media
         *Concentrated choice of media
         *Gillmor sees the internet as a catalyst for a challenge to this established hegemony; citizens use blogs and other online communication tools to share their own news.
         *Bloggers; the former audience. New form of people's journalism.

GRASSROOTS JOURNALISM; local level, activists, joining in with the community
CITIZEN-GENERATED MEDIA; petitions, pages made by locals
GLOBAL CONVERSATION; the topic of conversation worldwide; Twitter trends
GLOBAL AUDIENCE; people following trending topics online

"The rise of the citizen-journalist will help us listen. The ability of anyone to make news give a voice to the people who have been voiceless for years" (Gillmor, 2006)

KEY POINT --> It seems odd to think giving people this opportunity for voice can be negative; the Royals for example. They were given an opportunity to socialise with Prince Harry but instead they take photos to sell.

Dan Gillmor is interested in WHAT a journalist is nowadays. he likes new media technologies (eg YouTube) and believes the future of the internet is unpredictable and unexpected.

Web 2.0

OLD, NEW WE MEDIA, FUTURE OF MEDIA

*Making is connecting

*UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN views

è Web 2.0 is a metaphor

è Moving away from ‘passive’ consuming (no more watching TV for 4 hours a day)

è Pleasure from creating

è Engaging with the environment

è Using the internet in the way Tim Berners-Lee intended

è ‘Everyday’ creativity

*People want to make the world their own; customising their phone, customising their desk with photos and ornaments etc, Facebook

*People want to make their mark on the world; graffiti, novels

*People want to be social; connections, common interests

*People want to be creative; needs to be channelled, tools, making things

MAKING THINGS à SHARING THINGS

The ‘Making and Doing’ culture

è Networks

è Connecting with knowledge hands on

CRITICISMS

*Loss of high-brow culture – forgetting how to write because there is no necessity

*Sharing can be the sharing of negativity; eating disorders, nasty comments, riots, terrorism, porn, loss of privacy/security, danger

*There is still a passive audience who are not being creative

*Personalised advertisements (predicted through recent search history)