A Waste of Time or Digital Social Capital?
The term civic engagement has been used to reflect many different approaches to citizenship, whether local or global, including a variety of activities - from informal individual activities to formal collective ones.
Both blogging and commenting on blogs may be considered forms of civic engagement. In an interview for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Berekely’s Howard Rheingold emphasized the need to encourage students to blog, saying that 21st century civic education is “participatory media-literacy education”, distinguishing passive consumers of broadcast media content from active citizens who blog, share videos, comment on newspaper articles online, etc. (“Why Professors Ought to Teach Blogging and Podcasting”).
On the other hand, not everything posted by ordinary citizens is influential at this point in time, as explained by Ryan Rish of MIT in the paper “User Generated Content of an Online Newspaper: A Contested Form of Civic Engagement”. Regretting that user-generated content, such as feedback provided on online newspaper sites, is not currently considered a legitimate form of civic engagement, he expects greater impact for future civic and participatory journalism. While civic journalism involves professional journalists encouraging interactive news reporting, participatory journalism places citizens more centrally, involving them in the collection, analysis and publishing of news and ideas. Focusing his study on an online school newspaper in the U.S., Ryan reports that “Members of the local school district leadership discounted user-generated content associated with the online newspaper as a legitimate form of communication with school district officials, while users of the online newspaper and the editorial staff of the newspaper argued for the user-generated content to be considered a form of community conversation”.
Digital social capital or a waste of time? You decide.
Posted by May Mikati on 25 July 2012, 4:34 PM
The term civic engagement has been used to reflect many different approaches to citizenship, whether local or global, including a variety of activities - from informal individual activities to formal collective ones.
Both blogging and commenting on blogs may be considered forms of civic engagement. In an interview for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Berekely’s Howard Rheingold emphasized the need to encourage students to blog, saying that 21st century civic education is “participatory media-literacy education”, distinguishing passive consumers of broadcast media content from active citizens who blog, share videos, comment on newspaper articles online, etc. (“Why Professors Ought to Teach Blogging and Podcasting”).
On the other hand, not everything posted by ordinary citizens is influential at this point in time, as explained by Ryan Rish of MIT in the paper “User Generated Content of an Online Newspaper: A Contested Form of Civic Engagement”. Regretting that user-generated content, such as feedback provided on online newspaper sites, is not currently considered a legitimate form of civic engagement, he expects greater impact for future civic and participatory journalism. While civic journalism involves professional journalists encouraging interactive news reporting, participatory journalism places citizens more centrally, involving them in the collection, analysis and publishing of news and ideas. Focusing his study on an online school newspaper in the U.S., Ryan reports that “Members of the local school district leadership discounted user-generated content associated with the online newspaper as a legitimate form of communication with school district officials, while users of the online newspaper and the editorial staff of the newspaper argued for the user-generated content to be considered a form of community conversation”.
Digital social capital or a waste of time? You decide.
Posted by May Mikati on 25 July 2012, 4:34 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment