Open-Source Media

The media does an excellent job with providing current and latest new. Professional journalists are well equipped and trained to write all of our daily articles. In the United States we have no restrictions or censorship and the media is free of expressing any opinion or event. Some nations didn’t have the privilege of enjoying unrestricted media and broadcastings from all over the world. In Egypt, for example, the president Ali censored and regulated all of the information being fed to its citizens because he wanted to keep his government ideas within his nation and keep other ideas from entering Egypt. Nourediine Miladi expresses in Turnisia: A media led revolution?, that citizens from Tunisia, “migrate every night via satellite TV to the rest of the world. Global TV broadcasting, headed by Al Jazeer, has become the refuge of people who look for uncensored information” Restricting information to people is taking away their natural rights. We all have the right to adapt, read, and practice anything we desire. After many organized riots and protest the government realized that they were using social networks like Facbook, Twitter, and YouTube to expand, inform, and organize events. Again in Miladi’s Turnisia: A media led revolution?, it describes the hacking and overseeing of internet data by the government, “Error 404, an error message that comes up on computer screens whenever someone’s account is hacked, became known to activists as ‘Ammar 404’, taking the name of the government’s internet censor.” In Egypt it went to the extreme of shutting down the internet in order to stop citizens from organizing, but more importantly it took away their access to a public space.

On that note, professional journalist and media companies provide great information from all over the world. However, the problem with this is that even though they provide neutral information all of these articles are only written by those few professionals in our nation. Essentially, it is partially biased, biased by the company’s goals and objectives. The evolution of media is going to take us into open-source media. Instead of simply having media websites provided by journalist, ordinary users can post and ad news. The way it works is by allowing people to write their own articles without having any certification, simply go online and type. Similar to any open source it will be controlled by users and it will allow rapid updates on specific news/events. Willis and Bowman discuss in WeMedia that the web gives you the tools and all you need is your thought, “Armed with easy-to-use Web publishing tools, always-on connections and increasingly powerful mobile devices, the online audience has the means to become an active participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information” (Willis and Bowman). Allowing people to participate in our newsfeed will increase our participation in our “global village”. For example, in your Facebook your news feed updates so fast that sometimes you feel like you have been shadowing people. Media feeds will allow us to have a constant flow that will keep us current on our topics of choice.