The blogging phenomenon

This activity that I’m currently producing is unbelievably and remarkably revolutionary. If I told someone five years ago that blogs would be influencing our culture as much as people like Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara and James Joyce did, my mental state would most likely have been questioned. But alas, we’re not just living in the 21st century, we’re immersed in an information age where news can be accessed in a number of seconds and every body is a potential journalist.
The Pew Centre has found in mid 2005 “about 8 million Americans had created blogs and 32 million read them”. So, what exactly does this four letter word mean? The term blog is an “amalgam of web and log”. Blogging is a relatively new, but extremely rapid moving part of the ‘new news’ cycle that is developing more and more each day.

The concept of ‘citizen journalism’ has also emerged out of this ‘new news cycle’. With easy access to multi media technology and the internet people are becoming providers for a great deal of news coverage. The unfortunate event of the 7, July 2005 London bombings has been dubbed the catalyst for citizen reporting. The BBC’s director of news said that “within an hour of the first blast her London newsrooms received 50 emails with pictures and video clips attached”.

And why shouldn’t media consumers contribute to news content? Without a demand for the most detailed and immediate information there would certainly be no supply!

Source: Quinn, S. & Quinn-Allan, D. 2006, ‘User-generated content and the changing news cycle’, in Australian Journalism Review, vol. 28, no.1.

Media convergence

In his article ‘Why and how convergence is emerging’ Stephen Quinn focuses on the social, technological, legal and structural factors which affect media convergence. Once these factors have been considered Quinn looks at how convergence has been developed on a micro and macro level.

The first section of the article that I found particularly interesting was the concept of ‘information overload’. In this fast paced twenty first century our minds are constantly bombarded with advertisements, world news, Australian news, local news and opinions. This long string of information categories is also accompanied by the knowledge we seek to find from the Internet, magazines, books and the lady down the street who likes to fill you in on the latest gossip. Yes, indeed we live in an age when the only way to avoid an information overload is by being extremely selective with the content we store into our brains.

I have never considered that all of the fast paced media convergence occurring is, as Howard Finberg likes to put it a “reflection of society’s move into the information age”. We can now purchase mobile phones that can also act as a camera, video recorder, radio, internet and television and considering the reaction of the public to Apples latest mobile phone (people were camping out in the streets for days to purchase it) society is welcoming media convergence with open arms.


Reference: Quinn, S. 2005, ‘Why and how convergence is emerging’, in Convergent Journalism: the fundamentals of multi-media reporting, New York: Peter Lang.