dispatches from sigma kappa: day 2

caught in the moment
munching on  //  nada
eargasm  //  Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
mood  //  lazy

I want to take the time to point out that I look forward to reading Stefanac’s “Dispatches From Blogistan” because she writes her book just like how one would write a blog.  I feel like she is talking directly to me.  Stefanac does not litter her writing with ’scholarly’ words that one must keep a dictionary close to understand the text.  In another side, I disagree with a certain lecture’s belief that all blogs are not credible & that they are not useful in the assimilation of news.

I find it helpful that my Communication 360, Beginning News Reporting, we also covered the history of journalistic writing.  Stefanac’s chapter on the ‘History of Open Discourse’ brought detail & a better understanding of the origins of blogging, newswriting & the aspects of censorship that came with it.  Millions of dollars worth of libel lawsuits seem like miniscule punishments compared to the cropping of ears & the practice of branding one’s cheeks for being a “seditious libeller”.  It is nice to know that gossip was a point of interest in the Roman empire of Julius Caesar.

‘Blogs As Diaries’ seemed to solidify the popularity of blogs as a public diary.  I remember viewing a graph in class which illustrated that online diaries were the function of most blogs.  Blogs as a diary is what attracted me to first begin blogging on Xanga.  Although it was not encrypted like Leonardo da Vinci, my blog was my own for my friends to comment & converse with.  The hotlinks portion at the end of the chapter was an interesting compliment to my reading.

Dan Gillmor’s “We The Media” conveys an important theme in chapter 2.  ”The news is what we make of it, in more ways than one”.  I believe that his assertion could not be further from the truth.  If one only receives his or her news from one outlet, they do not expose themselves to other valid perspectives.  This leaves the consumer with a narrow-minded view, which is what one hopes to get away from when reading the news.  Gillmor goes even further to go in depth about different aspects of the Internet.  Aside from weblogs, mail lists, wikis & SMS (text messaging) also play an important part in the transmission of news.  Aside from Wikipedia, I did not anything else about wikis.  This chapter clarafied what a wiki was & gave a few examples.

Questions

1) Many professionals believe sites like Wikipedia are not credible resources.  How can wikis be credible/gain credibility when anyone can edit the content?

2) How will text messaging (SMS) further change the scope of rapid communication?