Journalism as a Reflection of "New Technology, New Voices"

Patrick Butler's "New Technology, New Voices" article provides a concise yet wide-ranging analysis of new media technologies' impact across many cultures. In addition to finding commonalities and differences globally, he also focuses on the journalists and citizens' lives who have access into situations that an outsider likely would not.

The article also demystified some commonly held notions such as: the exaggerated effectiveness of China's Internet censorship and that Americans lead the mobile technology world. Modernized and centrally-populated countries like South Korea certainly are known to be among the world's mobile technology leaders. However that in 2007 or earlier, many African countries, such as remote areas in Botswana had mobile access to the news media as their primary if not their only source of news access. Whereas at this time the United States mostly used mobile technology for personal use and to vote in their favorite "American Idol" contestent; the idea of how other counties use mobile technology is inspiring in two ways: news information can inform people in relatively isolated areas where newspapers are not easily found and that South Korea successfully used SMS to vote in a way that had a great impact.

The opening story of Egyptian Wael Abbas, who lost his paid employment as a journalist due to his contribution to raising the issue of abuse by police in Mubarak's government, effectively demonstrated what I assume many traditionally-trained American journalists would not be willing to do in terms of sacrifice. The reasons that American reporters do not often take on such perils are not that our mainstream media frequently exposes injustices on its own or that American freelances generally have an easier time completing investigative work. Instead it seems that the press of the United States is often too large of a bureaucracy in the psyche of most Americans to be overcome or simply that the general lack of urgency does not justify selflessness.


In a broader sense simply the way we approach technology says a lot about Americans as a society of individuals that often treads political deviance carefully or quietly. Whereas other countries have a portion of a population that will risk themselves to varying degrees to record important events so that they are noticed, like Butler mentions in the article, Americans would rather engage or create news from an armchair more often than not. It might be because we believe we believe that we all have too much at stake to lose or it could be because we are trained to be passive consumers for the typically.

Butler caused me to think about at what point is someone not only a citizen journalist or a traditional journalist. Instead another question for me was when is a citizen a journalist, an activist, or simply a trill-seeker. In the end do any of these distinctions matter if it is about what they record and how it is interpreted by those it is distributed to. Ultimately the answer seems to end up being that the reception of the work determines how we brand all parties from the person who recorded it to the subjects they recorded to the interpretations of its audience.