O yeah, I'm quick this week, the article of Warde will follow, probably after the weekend:).
J.D. Lasica and Dan Gillmor:
I combine these two texts for my critical question, because they have the same subject: weblogs and journalism. They both say that weblogs are redefining journalism. Journalism was (and the official journalism still is) very strict; the conventions are accuracy, credibility, trustworthiness and being straight up with your readers. Webloggers don’t really care about these conventions, they just tell us what happened or what their opinion on something is. Readers can critical respond to that. Bit by bit, the blogger and his readers come more and more to the core of what their talking about. As Lasica quotes Shirky on page 71: “The order of things in broadcast is ‘filter, then publish’. The order in communities is ‘publish, then filter.” I want to know which way works better.
I think that the conventions of the ‘old’ journalism are very valuable, because it makes sure that journalists tell the truth, that they researched their sources. But everybody knows that a journalist can tell a story in a certain way, holding himself to the facts, but for example leave some facts out of it, by which there is a story that has the same facts as what happened, but isn’t what happened. For example, when you read the papers in the
I think that the weblogs and their way of doing journalism changes that coloured perspective. Everybody who reads articles in a weblog can respond to it; say if he agrees with it or if he thinks that it must be seen in a different way. Because people read weblogs from all over the world (I read Dutch, American and Japanese weblogs today, so it’s that easy), they get a view of what the different versions of a story are, what others think about a topic and so on. That makes the reader think about what his or hers opinion is. So, weblog journalism makes that reader will think more critical and gives not ‘one truth’, but several point of views on a story. That’s why I think weblog journalism is great; I think that weblogs change our perception of the world. Of course I know that the ‘old journalism’ won’t ever fade (and that’s ok), but the weblogs made it possible that we don’t take everything for granted what’s in the ‘old journalism’.
Van Middelaar:
This text is about anti-globalisation, in particulair the different movements in anti-globalisation. First of all, I think Van Middelaar needs an extra course ‘How to write a paper’, because his structure sucks. I’m sorry, it not nice of me to say that, but I’m annoyed with the bad structure: he talks about globalisation and anti-globalisation, but doesn’t even accurately explain what globalisation exactly is. Of course, it’s a popular term, so I can think of a few things that belong to the term globalisation, but I wanna know precisely what it is. Also, I want to know what the anti-globalists exactly are against with. What I read in the text is that they are against the immense commercial culture (the billboards all over the country) and so against the capitalism. Well, I don’t know if I’m right. So, my question is: What does anti-globalisation stands for?
Ok, I looked it up at www.attact.org, because according to Van Middelaar this is a central player in the anti-globalisation movement. On the Australian website (the have websites from all over the world, so I just picked one) I found the main ideas of ATTAC:
‘ATTAC campaigns for:
- Democracy and transparency for global financial markets.
- Democracy and transparency for global institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Export Credit Agencies (ECAs)
- A Currency Transaction Tax such as the Tobin Tax
- The outlawing of tax havens
- Cancellation of Third World debt
- Increased State control of superannuation funds
- The promotion of Human Rights, and Environmental and Labour standards over the rights of corporations and investors.’
(this is from http://www.australia.attac.org/html/about_index.html)
I just found a webpage that gives me the answer to what globalisation exactly is:
‘Our goal is to ensure that the poor are not left behind by globalization, and that technology is used in the developing world as a tool with which local people take advantage of opportunities, instead of one with which they are taken advantage of.’ (from http://www.globalenvision.org/index.php?fuseaction=aboutus.main) So, globalisation is about the free market system I think.
Warde:
Warde makes in this article the distinction between the culturalisation of economy and the economification of culture. I’m interested in how the Internet has an influence of these two types. Did the Internet stimulate the culturalisation of economy or the economification of culture, or maybe both? With the introduction of the Internet there came a medium that is interesting for everybody; it doesn’t matter where you’re interests are, you can find it on the Internet. Fansites, music downloads, getting to know the culture behind a company (for example, on the Trump-site we researched before, there is a lot of info about what the company represents and what their ideology is > this is an example of how the Internet makes the economy more cultural), and many more. So, I think the culture became much more visible because of the Internet. But it made culture also more economic, because you can now easily order cultural stuff like paintings, or cd’s, or whatever.