neticulum

I’ve been a bad blog mommy this week, so here’s to making up for lost time. 

The reason I’ve been a bit absent is because I’ve been spending a lot of time reconsidering the direction and focus of my thesis. The more I learn about Web 2.0′s interactions with democracy, the more baffled I am. I guess it all depends on what aspect of democracy we’re talking about. In terms of citizen participation, Web 2.0 has been a blessing. More citizens than ever are on the internet, writing about political issues, expressing their opinions, and making their voices heard. People have new opportunities to organize and fundraise over the internet, making citizen political organizations more complex and, dare I say, effective.

But the media’s role in democracy is not simply about giving citizens a forum in which to express themselves. It also concerns providing people with the information to develop political opinion, increasing the transparency of government activity, and endowing citizens with the knowledge to better their own lives and those of others. In terms of this function, Web 2.0 has had mixed effects. While there is certainly more knowledge available to the average person than there ever has been before in history, the reliability of that knowledge is questionable. Critics have complained that journalistic standards of integrity and accuracy, from fact-checking to reputation, have declined with the surge in grassroots media and the blogosphere. They argue that quality has been forsaken for quantity. So does the increase in news sources allow people to become more politically informed, or were they better off with less news sources that were more reliable? Then again, the actual reliability of mainstream news sources has also been historically questionable. There is also something to be said for the benefits of having a diversity of news sources – people are exposed to more competing perspectives and are encouraged to use critical reason to develop their own opinions. But can the citizenry be relied upon to be proactive enough to weed through news sources and find the ones that are the most accurate? Can we also rely on other mechanisms, such as comments/discussion and name recognition, to help seperate the good news sources from the bad? Is there any other way to focus the flow of information given the proliferation of its tributaries?