ost journalists would agree that cyberspace is not everything it could be, but Andrew Keen, a veteran of Silicon Valley, goes further. He says it has become a dangerous place for everyone except power-hungry capitalists and snooping governments and the rest of us are its victims.
His book The Internet Is Not the Answer with its comprehensive and forensic examination of how the Internet is doing bad things to our lives, is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of communications and journalism.
In an interview with The Guardian Keen underscores how the net’s free for all culture, including news, has caused havoc in the creative industries. There were promises that the Internet would come up with solutions for the crisis that has overtaken
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A generation of young people in the journalism schools in Europe and the US have few quality jobs to look forward to. Some will survive as freelancers, but many, if not most, are destined for advertising, corporate communications or public and political information jobs.
Keen’s book will infuriate some. His hard-hitting analysis of the overweening power of Google, for instance, is unlikely to impress Jeff Jarvis at the City University of New York. In his 2009 book What Would Google Do? Jarvis, a passionate supporter of market solutions to journalism and its crisis, argued that companies and individuals should study and perhaps copy Google 's methods for succeeding at internet entrepreneurship.
But it’s precisely that form of entrepreneurship which Keen, a serial Internet entrepreneur himself, has in his sights. His first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was a lacerating critique of the obsession with user-generated content. He then asked how quality content can be created in an online environment (including journalism) that demands everything for
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Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Civic Media and cofounder of the international bloggers’ website Global Voices, is another contrarian raising the alarm.
In his 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cospompolitans in the Age of Connection Zuckerman explains how the Internet has made everyone less dependent on professional journalists and editors for information about the wider
Nicholas Carr is a writer who writes in these kind of field: technology, business, and culture. Carr wrote this essay called, “Is Google Making us Stupid”; Carr fully explains how internet changes people’s thinking, a way of reading, and knowledge with rhetoric strategies. For logos, Carr thoroughly supports his arguments with great supporting points from credit sources. He explains how the internet affects us in reading. For pathos, he points out that human’s brain would work differently since we are using the internet widely comparing to the generation, whom lives without the internet.
The net is such an excellent resource for almost everything we need; whenever we have a research paper due, want to see pictures of family members, or are simply bored, the net supplies. However, Carr states that such easy accessibility of information comes with a price, and that the Internet is slowly taking away our ability to be profound and replacing it with swift superficial thinking (Carr 801). My generation, myself included, knows nothing about opening a book and immersing our minds in the literature. On the contrary, we know everything about social networking and jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink. Our focus has been reduced to a picture with a caption and a 140 letter Twitter post.
He predicts that people reading this article will be skeptical of what he is saying because he assumes that the readers use the internet, and so they would be reluctant to think of it negatively. He addresses this point by saying, “Maybe I’m a worrywart,” and “So yes you should be skeptical of my skepticism.” By aligning himself with the reader’s thoughts, the reader might be more inclined to trust him even more. I myself thought that if he understood that most people would think he was crazy and still came to the conclusion that the internet’s negative potential outweighs the positives it offers, then maybe it really is
Stories are no longer respectable and virtuous as they were at modern journalism’s beginning. Thus, by journalists Fallows and Rothman have named the media as unethical. Another way that modern journalists have transformed today’s media is that the media now relies on the popularity of its stories and articles. Journalist Jack Shafer uses his article, “The Rise and the Fall of the Obama Media Romance” as an example of popular opinion reflecting
He decided to write this article during the midterm election to help educate voters that they need to be better informed about a topic before they make a decision. Nicholas Carr, the author of “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” is an American writer
Carr writes, “ I'm just seeking convenience, but because that way I THINK has changed”(33). For him, the internet is a way for him to access information quicker than using a book, or any other medium. This constant use of the internet has altered his thought process, in which he now it is easier for him to use the internet rather than reading a book. When writing about how the web has brought about change, Gladwell claims, “ Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change (43).”
Nicolas Carr, an author and researcher, insinuates that people who use computers and the internet are becoming more shallow human beings and that this technological tool, despite its advantages that are applauded by many, is harming society as a whole. Carr has discussed these thoughts in his book The Shallows, on television in an interview with Stephen Colbert, and in an article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” While Carr believes that the internet has its place and that it has been extremely helpful to him as a researcher and writer, he also believes that the internet encourages multitasking and boosts superficiality. I share these same thoughts with Carr. While the internet has been extremely helpful in producing a more efficient and fast-paced environment, it has at the same time produced challenges and weaknesses in our society, like multitasking and frivolity.
In The Essay “The News” Neil Postman demonstrates the problems with News on TV and the Psychology behind it of why our society continues to watch. Postman displayed many points that becuase television news is must appeal to everyone in a short amount of time; the coverage is often shallow and gives a false impression of the world. Neil Postman describes the time restrictions of (22 mins) because of commercials overtaking the news. This reflects “The News” as we know it to become a big piece of entertainment that has nothing to do with the intellectual information that affects our lives. The lack of in-depth look on News nowadays draws an Appearance vs. Reality that the News isn’t what It should be.
Society expect to be constantly entertained; they have become so concerned with things such as who the latest star is dating, scandals, or dumb people doing rather idiotic things. Much of society have been consumed in their personal instant gratification and what makes them “happy”. When on an off chance that news does show things that are serious and impactful(not necessarily positive things that is happening in the world) people have become so numb that the best they could do is feel sympathetic and at worst continue on with their day. The other part of the problem is that those behind what is being published and shown on the news media have been absorbed in their avarice nature, whatever allows them to make as much profit they do. “Writing thousands of hours of coverage from what could have been summarized in a couple of minutes every few weeks, a new rhetorical strategy was developed, or-let’s be generous-evolved”(6), Saunders describes the new formula formed by mass news firms that would yield the most profit.
The rapid expansion of technological growth is immersing our culture. The Nathan Jurgenson’s “The IRL Fetish”, argues that people have weird obsessions about the offline. Technological advances allow people to experience the online, but Jurgenson realizes that people are also fetishizing the movement against the online. People and novelists who complain the online world laments, “Writer after writer laments the loss of a sense of disconnection, of boredom (now redeemed as a respite from anxious info-cravings) …” (Jurgenson 127).
59% of people aged 18 to 29 say the internet is shaping who they are. “The Veldt” and “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury are two dystopian novels where technology has become a major factor in their life, destroying them by the day. “The veldt” is based in the future, where a family is given all the modern benefits of technology, claiming to make their lives easier and more efficient. For example, the kitchen makes dinner for all the family, allowing them to engage in other fun activities. However, with every good thing, comes bad.
Brian Williams is the editor of NBC Nightly News. In his essay “Enough about You” it addresses a big issue that social media is taking over the news world. He states that with social media news getting so popular he is losing viewers because of the American culture that has changed and people are only worried about themselves. A good point he uses is of how using the internet give us the ability to get the information that we only want to see and hear. It also allows us to not hear or see the information that we might not want to know about.
Clay Shirky, the author of “Does the internet make you smarter?” wrote about how ignorance has poisoned the internet with incorrect information. Not only does technology has its flaws, but so do books and novels dating back to the Protestant Reformation. Even though many people are against the internet Shirky reassures that if used correctly and appropriately, then it can become a very useful tool that can “tap our cognitive surplus”. The increased collaboration of technology is important to society for the reason that the internet is full of valuable knowledge that can be claimed very quickly and easily. Increased collaboration is absolutely a benefit.
Internet is developing day to day. Internet and networks are binding us in new ways. As Rheingold argues, “There is a huge social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal authority. Every intercourse creates new association in a child’s brain, every email, tweet, search, or post is contributing and nourishing connections in our global brain, changing the shape of the Internet that we billions of people are progressing together. Young child brain or an internet brain both are always trying to make connections.
According to Zizi Papacharissi in "The virtual sphere: The internet as a public sphere" web technology has the capacity for reestablishing the public sphere, giving the global public the possibility of freely and equally debate various issues. The problem that Papacharissi points to is the instead of promoting a new and equal behavioral patterns, it seems that the global capitalistic trend is still highly influential with the internet following it. For Papacharissi, the conditions for the constitution of a public sphere do not depend only on technology, but also on its users and owners. In did today's technology allows more people to engage in politics but this is still not sufficient, in Papacharissi's view, the reestablish the public sphere.