Citizen meets Journalism!
“Accepting that you don’t know anything and allowing people in public to let you see, hear and know things” (Lewis, 2011).
With our continuous acquisition for knowledge, we always try to find a source of information to further verify that what we try to sought for are something reliable and indeed substantial. One source that we can consider is with the information broadcasted by journalism, since journalism produces and distributes reports on current events that are supported by facts, or with proof and evidences. However, the facts and evidences used in the broadcast by journalism are also in question due to its time relevance or its authentication whether these are objectively concluded and transmitted to the public considering that journalism before was not accessible to everyone and are somewhat exclusive to entitled journalists.
The advent of technology and internet paved the movement for the new media called “citizen journalism” or “collaborative journalism” that lets the public citizens participate in the collection, analysis, and distributing of news and information to the mass media. This as well contributed in providing solutions to the issue of how journalism was treated before, where facts are now being verified and evidences are as well being supported. Listening to the TEDx Talks of Paul Lewis regarding citizen journalism, I certainly agree that “We can’t know everything” and that “We must be open to listen to others” as this would contribute to our attainment of true knowledge. Since everyone can now be involved and participate in the recurring for evidences of an event or issue that unlike before where journalism is only exclusive to journalists; we can now cohesively listen, watch and speak on different perspectives towards the event or issue certain.
Paul Lewis continued explaining the flaws in the system of information dissemination by the media, and this aroused my awareness of how my participation in the social media is very much important and relevant in acquiring and spreading information. The technology that we use, the internet, and most especially us, public citizens, are very much powerful in the revealing of the truth for every situation. We must act upon and conceive transparency at all scenarios in order to fully unveil the truth, to supersede further investigation as concerned to the provided case in the ted talk where information was only in a one way process. We may have listened, read or watched to some news and information but we must as well be inquisitive in verifying if these information are supported by evidences, proofs and most especially facts that are truly certain.
Citizen journalism and the TEDx Talks in itself has further taught me that there really are different sides of a story, where one may be the speaker, the other may only be just a listener, but we must always be the one who questions. We must not put everything into conclusion just because someone of authority figure has said that such things happened, that we must always have a questioning mind. We, as an individual and a part of the powerful public citizen, must as well put in emphasis that we hold accountability to the information we collect and disseminate as these clutches a strong point for decisions and understanding by the mass media.
