Essay Proposal
Anonymous authorship on the internet:
The loss of truth?
A Scholarly essay proposal submitted by:
Diana Wilkes
November 3, 2010
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
Thomas Jefferson
The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves-and the better the teacher, the better the student body.
Warren Buffett
The press is our chief ideological weapon.
Nikita Khrushchev
The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. ~Bill Gates
Hi Diana,
Sorry for the delay– Yes, great start:
Thesis should be more or less:
According to Andrew Keen (2007), the internet is a vehicle of mis-communication. The ability for anyone and everyone to become an autonomous news blogger fuels the rise of citizen journalism but also risks a danger of amateur displacing professional journalist. Is an increase in egalitarianism worth the risk of a progressive exposure to unfiltered authored news by amateurs? Certainly, the boundary between who counts as “the press” has blurred with access to new technologies, challenging legal interpretation and educational practice. For example, “the press” was recently defined by the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. National Post (2010) as an “ill-defined group of writers and speakers,” but not all are granted privileges of “the press. Hence, questions of journalism ethics must prevail: Where is quality control and fact checking? How do we know the information we are exposed to is true? What is the need for professional journalism and news reporting?
Outline
1. Topic
According to Andrew Keen (2007), the internet is a vehicle of mis-communication. The ability for anyone and everyone to become an autonomous news blogger is enabling our news reporting to become completely amateur. Where is the quality control and fact checking? How do we know the information we are exposed to is true? What happened to the need for professional journalism and news reporting?
2. Theme and argument
a. The argument or thesis
As information technology expands and reaches an exponentially increasing audience, the people of the world are erroneously influenced by the amateur journalism afforded by the internet. Is an increase in egalitarianism worth the risk of becoming progressively more exposed to unfiltered authored materials by amateurs?
b. The background
The internet now provides decentralized access to unedited information, whereas historically people have retrieved information from accredited newspapers, magazines, encyclopedias and journals. The advent of blogs, wikis and social networks has provided people with the ability to create an online read-write culture.
3. Primary and Secondary sources for insight into the topic
a. Issues to be addressed
- Blog fact checking and watered down news (updated? Topical? Quality? Quantity?)
- Copyright and IP
- Westernization of information on the internet
- anonymity vs. privacy, censorship
b. Literature to be consulted
See the list of references provided at the end.
4. Provisional conclusions drawn from the argument & issues or data
While proponents of educational technology and freedom of speech supporters will argue the merits of these internet affordances (social networks, web 2.0 applications and opensource), there is an inherent danger lurking within the words we hear in Youtube videos and those that we read within blogs and wikis: a recurrent lack of truth, inaccurate reports and invalidated statements.
5. Structure / sections of the paper, etc.
- Anonymous authorship on the internet
- Trends- the good, the bad, the ugly
- Benefits- hidden and not so hidden
- Issues- barriers and challenges
- Recommendations-where to from here
- Conclusion- looking back, moving forward
References:
Blogging: Genius Strategies for Instant Web (2002). Stone, Biz. New Riders. http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/0-73571-299-9/firstchapter#X2ludGVybmFsX0ZsYXNoUmVhZGVyP3htbGlkPTAtNzM1NzEtMjk5LTkvdmlpaQ==
Hershock, Peter D. (1999). Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age
Albany, State University of New York Press.
Is Cyberspace Destroying Society? An Online Conference with Sven Birkerts May 30, 199. Accessed on November 1, 2010 from http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/aandc/trnscrpt/birkerts.htm
Keen, Andrew. 2007. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture
New York, Doubleday.
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1-6. Retrieved October 15th, 2010, from http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf
Pros and Cons of Blogging: 19 articles. Accessed on Oct 31, 2010 from http://www.helium.com/knowledge/17500-pros-and-cons-of-blogging
Smith, Scott. Amateur Hour: The rise of the “average joe” critic leads to more voices—and more questions about whose opinion to trust. Retrieved on Nov 1, 2010 from http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/features/25797/amateur-hour
The Editors of The New Atlantis, “Blogs Gone Bad,” The New Atlantis, Number 8, Spring 2005, pp. 106-109. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/docLib/TNA08-StateoftheArt-BlogsGoneBad.pdf