In the reading "Everyone is a media outlet" by Clay Shirkey we can find the term "Mass amateurization". So what does this exactly mean? Is this a collapsing of the walls between professionals and amateurs. As a professionals Clay mean one particular group - journalists. Who can be described as a journalist? Clay provide few definition of a journalist - one is according to Oxford English Dictionary "a person who writes for newspapers or magazines or prepares news to be broadcast on radio or television" (p.71). We are tended to trust this definition, but in nowadays with the existing of the internet this definition might be kind of old and not full. Clay give the example of few "journalists" who was working at the official press and get fired as a result of their blogging and now work in the internet instead of a physical press - Kevin Sites, Dan Gillmor or others - who became a journalist as a result of their blogging, such as Xeni Jardin.
So what is a blogging and what is the difference between blogging and official press? Shirkey said that shifting of the borders and birth of a mass amateurization became possible with the internet. As an example we can think about a story with Strom Thurmond's hundredth birthday party and Lott's remarks on this, which became a bomb thanks to the bloggers (p.62).
The question is - should a bloggers be treated as a journalists and have a same rights or not? Shirkey writes about "journalistic privilege" - "the right of journalists to grant promises of confidentiality in order to convince potential sources to cooperate" (p.70). This is a difficult question and to solve this problem as I mentioned before we need to establish a definition of "journalism".
Nowadays blogging is very useful and helps us to get very quick and accurate access to the information and facts. It helps also to prove some facts, which early was almost impossible to prove in some aspects.
As an example I can think about such controversial and embarrassing things like bribery of the police officers. This is a very big issue in eastern Europe and the rest of the world. Right now if you did not break some rules while you driving, but police officer tries to make you pay, you can take your cell and simply record him/her and use this as a proof. Many officers get scared once our fellow citizens started to upload those kind of videos on blogs and youtube, so percentage of bribes on the roads is shrinking.
This is a very powerful tool - to record something on your camera and upload it on some blog or web, because this is one of the way to deal with corruption in our society.
Another crime, which happens in Russia, would not be solved if very "smart" skinheads would not upload their " VIDEO OF PRIDE" on the one of skinheads blog. So some responsible citizen after seeing this video reported it to the police and police arrested those" intelligent" criminals and put them to the jail.
Another important amateurs initiative is happens recently in Russia. Today in the morning I was watching new and were surprised, when president Medvedev on national television said "Thank you" to all bloggers. Right now eastern part of Russian federation is suffering from fire, because of the enormously hot weather most of the forests are on fire, so thousands of the people lost their homes etc...So amateurs on so of the web, sort of twitter, realized, that Government can not help to all of the people and they organized blog for help to the victims of fire. It helps to solve a lots of problems, because not only Russian, but Polish, German, Ukrainian and other citizens, not only governments help to the people who had lost everything.
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