I approached week 2 with a bit of trepidation knowing I needed to set up a twitter account and to start blogging for assessment. I have never really understood the fascination with these mediums; I have only just really figured out facebook in fact. So I was a little bit nervous about the whole process. The lecture then took us through the different ages of the media, web 1.0, web 2.0 and today’s web 3.0. As someone more comfortable with web 1.0 and “old media” such as newspapers and television, I felt a little bit overwhelmed by the different permutations of the world wide web in the year 2012.
It was interesting to see how this age of the ‘semantic web’ was tied in to news and journalism. The analogy with the jelly beans rung true with me. I consider news to be a right not a privilege. Everyone should be, and deserves to be, informed and knowledgeable about current affairs. One of the slideshows was a graph which showed only 14% of people would pay for online news as opposed to a fairly high 37% for movies, and interestingly enough 29% of people would pay online for books. I suppose perhaps people don’t see the need to pay online when they can see news on television, listen to it on radios, and perhaps pick up a free paper from work or uni etc.
Did I enjoy this lecture? I did, it eased my concerns in a way about whether or not ‘news’ and ‘journalism’ were still alive and well. The following day I had my first tute with Ali Rae, and one of the first things she said was that something like over 80% of journalists use twitter. I was shocked, how could this be? I worried twitter was dumbing down society. People spelling tomorrow as ‘tmrw’, poor grammar lurked around every corner. But the more I use it the more I realise that brevity is an important quality in a journalist and I am constantly checking twitter for news stories from sites such as ABC, SMH, The Guardian etc.
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