Internet's way of life

Community values are not easy to be respected when we are talking about a huge population, isn’t it?

We all know, and so Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke said, that living in community is what makes us as happy as we can be. But there are certain rules that have to be accepted by all of the members of a community if we really want to make our life as better as possible.

These rules are values as respect, civism, truthfulness, tolerance… but these ethical values are not always respected because, as Hobbes said "war of all against all", and people go for their own interest.

If the “rules of community” are not respected in a country, less in the world, but even less in the parallel world that we are creating that is the “cyberspace”. Why is that? It’s as simple at this: We, in face-to-face communication are looking the source –that is the person next to us- and the same in television, even the same when someone talks about another thing that we know “by ears”, but what happened in the “online world”? Internet give as a “global community” but the anonymity in which we, as users can have, make the truthfulness, which is a principal ethical value for the success of a community, break into pieces.

It is a complicated issue that we have to try to change. In my opinion, it is true that Internet has become a tool very complicated to control, but I think that is because we have being using it.

We don’t have to use it, we have to live it. With other words: we don’t have to be users, we have to be citizens and as citizens demand the audience to be transparent with what they say, (I mean giving the sources where they get the information from) and also we have to do the same. That would make that the “community model” that Internet is, that the model of many-to-many, be more efficient and ethical.

I find interesting this webside about the Community model, so make a click and have a look, BE CITIZENT! :  http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/learning_community.html

My point of view is that, more that giving the importance to the development of the technology, we should call our attention to the social values of an “entire world” that is connected. That would be a real revolution.

It is not consist in develop one medium of communication but make a “way of life”. That is that Internet is, a way of life.

"you are the audience" 

Image from google.images

DIGITAL MEDIA's roll in the situation of JAPAN

There are two weeks since the tsunami of Japan devastated the country. The 11^th of March this was my first notice of the catastrophe . “I am shock”. It was my first reaction. I was living the catastrophe trough my screen of the computer.

But of course apart of thinking about tons of people that were affected and all houses that were devastated because of the waves’ force, I was thinking “how incredible and important is the digital media as a support of the information!”  With the evolution of the digital medias we are participating of what it is happening in our “global community”.  This days I was watching the news that "El país" , "Reuters", "The New York Times" trough my computer to see how the situation was going on and I could read new information each 5 minutes.  

I find very important the roll that the new medias are taking in the global facts that are happening nowadays. Few years ago we couldn’t get informed about what was happening in other parts of the world by the same way that we can do it now. Now we have videos, which not just professional people make, not just journalists are the intermediate of the fact and us, but people are able to make a recording and send trough social networks as twitter or facebook in a real time.

I just wanted to make myself think and make you also think about the importance for the essence of information, for the essence of feedback, the digital media and internet as a way of make people more interactive and more active with what it is happening around them.

Marshall McLuhan was right

I was amazed by this man when I met him trough books.

How could he know the pat that the technological word was going to draw?  He gave us the essence of Internet without having the object of study, the Internet itself.

He explain us that cold media –those that need the interaction with people to work- would make a revolution in the way that people used to communicate.

Tons of hundreds of years ago, people used to communicate with people, I mean, people JUST communicate with others face to face and old Medias, as newspapers for example, just were like a font of information for people. But McLuhan wanted to change the way of communication and information was taken. McLuhan wanted to make population realized that “the medium was the message” because the medium (mass medias) were part of us. Now the television has a new paper, to be a length of our body, a tool that makes us possible been adapted to the world we live and a tool that is possible to be used just if there is one condition: feedback.

Is not amazing? We knew it, he knew what going to happened. He studied the changes in his moment, with the television, but now we can put into practice his theory with the computer, with internet, even with smartphones as blackberry. They really are a tool to be used if you want to live the essence of the reality, our reality as journalist, “the information reality”. Now we can be connected 24 hours with people that it is not near us. We can be connected with that “global village” that McLuhan told us.

So information in the new era of digital media cannot be considered as a way just to be informed. We are not passive audience anymore, because now media need us to exist. We are part of that information, and we should act like that if we want to be not just persons but opinion leaders. If we are opinion leaders we could be good journalist.

Now, talking about the essence of Internet, it is important to say that information is recycling all the time and that there too much information what make people as journalist not to be very confident with the font of internet. There are too many data and we have to brake the noise that that powerful source give us.

There are social networks, there tons of websites that make a global village more and more smaller year by year and we have to know that because of the digital divide, people that doesn’t have Internet doesn’t exist nowadays. They don’t have the tools to see all around the world and we, the “developed” countries should take care of that gash and try that those developing countries can be part of the global community.

McLuhan introduce as the new digital era as an amazing and beautiful world where everybody can have the tools to live but he wasn’t capable to see the inconvenients of his new reality, but there are, so Let’s try to solve them.

Hi all, and welcome to my first posts. I want my journalism mates to share their opinions and debate about the “quick sands” were our world, the world of mass media and communication is walking, so… let’s go!