Jour1111 Lecture 2

The first substantive lecture in Journ1111 gave an overview of the evolution and development of the web through its three manifestations as well as the various elements included in these stages. This makes me reflect on the first few sites that I browsed growing up. Perhaps the most vivid memory of Web 2.0 was the old neopets game or MSN messenger, sites built around wide social groups that facilitated a sort of social interaction through entertainment. Being someone who likes to keep an open eye of the outside world, the idea of hyperlocalisation gives me this sense of insular, uninteresting online culture with the emersion of Web 3.0 (semantic web). I feel it is very important to maintain a constant intake of news from around the world, especially in cases such as the Eurozone economic crash and largescale social and political movements such as the Arab spring. The world roils and seethes all over and grows to affect us no matter how far away we live. It's easy to lose sight of the grand picture, we're all a part of it, if we show ignorance in the face of plight, how will any problem ever get fixed? I believe the web has an important role to play in international socio-political affair and the reduction of news to a hyperlocal level would obstruct this role. Recently several online entities that I frequent have gone behind paywalls, a strategic move economically but I often understand paywalls as a promotion of exclusivity for those who can afford it; eventually creating an information gap as those on the higher end of the socio-economic scale are able to afford more news than those on the lower. I dont hate the internet, however I constantly see its influence and utility being abused, I.E. Kony 2012: Not a bad cause, however, the creators weren't honest about the recipients of their donations and their information (whether purosely so[in the case of the Ugandan Military]) was flawed and inaccurate.
 
The other concern raiseed in lecture 2 that resonated with me was the idea of news as just entertainment. My choice of news intake is the paper, unless I watch SBS news which is very rare. Commercial news however, makes me weep on the inside, its hysterical, pandering, oversimplified and trashy, the perfect example of entertainment news. My mother watches Seven news, so at times I have been obligated to view as well.
I remember sitting through about 15 minutes of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes breakup news; interviews, custody disputes, prenup arguments, the whole shabangabang! Then, a tiny little addition at the end of the main news headlines: "33 egyptian civilians kidnapped in Israel, Israeli govt. suspects Hamas...." then sports... not even a DoA on the poor Egyptians. I'm not sure who watches the world from such a perspective but I think Australia needs its own version of E.T. where wannabe journo's can dump all their crap about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and let news networks be news networks. All the channels could take a share of the shows profits, depending on who covered which nosejob/breakup/african child adoption.