1st post

What are the most pressing communication justice issues today?



In my opinion, the most pressing communication justice issues today are the issues of new types of media, namely digital, and the freedoms and protections of these. The Constitution was born in a different era, and therefore was created without knowledge of certain factors of modern society. This has been the issues with constitutional law for many decades now. How to we translate this document into our modern society? How do we use the document that gives us our protections in a world that has changed so much from what it was in 1791? I feel like this is an issue that I cannot address alone, seeing as it has been an issue since the start of the digital age. I feel like raising issues and barriers will help me further understand the issues surrounding this new type of media.

In the past, media had been more regulated, having newspapers written by the press and whatnot. Today, anyone and everyone who wants to and has access to the Internet can get online and post whatever they want about anything that they want. This begs the question of how far is too far? Of course we have different ideas and morals in this society. Is it alright for someone to hop on the Internet and start spewing racist commentary about our president? Should that be covered by the first amendment, or should that person be prosecuted.

I feel like journalism would have been better off without the invention of the blogosphere, namely because there is a reason why not everyone is a journalist, why not everyone can become published. I also feel like a major problem in our society is the way that people get their information. Being a political science student, I have addressed the issue of media fracturing more than once, and the truth is, like Mark Twain said, that, "In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination". To me, this is a large and pressing issue. Our society needs to educate themselves individually, not rely on the Bill O'Reily's and John Stewart's of this world to sift through the news and present it with bias. The fact is that most people get their news from Fox, and the fact is that most people who watch Fox are the least educated on the issue - there is major spin happening in journalism and communication. The truth is is that someone will watch Bill O'Reily speak on his show in a biased manner and will blog on it in a biased manner - usually without doing any fact checking themselves. Someone will inevitably read this a truth, without fact checking, and so on and so forth. The people in our society have gotten lazy about formulating their own opinions. The blogosphere has further been a catalyst of this. Because of the fact that there are no limitations, there has become a large database of false information spread across the Internet.

Just because I have issues with the validity of the information on the internet does not mean that I do not appreciate the outlet. Personally, this is the first blog I've ever written, ever. I applaud people who can use blogs to address issues personal to themselves and have an outlet for their grievances. I think it is very important for people to have a means to be able to question the society they live in - questioning one's actions usually leads to positive self-criticism. For this, I feel we should have an open outlet, the Internet, so that we can continue to progress our society and our opinions, both public and personal. We need to be critical of our thoughts as well as others, we need to learn how to do this without outright attacking others, something that can be learned with practice.

It is so wrong in my opinion that there are so many citizens out there that have no idea what their rights as Americans are. Many Americans do not take the time to read or analyze the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Because of this, our society becomes lazy on its education of its rights which creates an atmosphere for those rights to be taken away. Will you miss something you do not have? How many people are truly educated on the Patriot Acts? This is something every citizen should take the time to find out for themselves, not just the Patriot Acts, but all of our rights as citizens. The rights to freedoms that all Americans were born with.