From T. Paine to Blogs and the Beyond

I initially chose to do this piece because I knew who Thomas Paine was; it turns out, it has nothing to do with Thomas Paine, he is only briefly mentioned. Luckily, unlike most of the other articles i have read for this class, this particular article was really easy to understand and pretty straight forward despite the lack references to Thomas Paine. Basically, the main “argument” of the article is that blogs are the hot new thing in personal journalism; but they did not really spread their wings and began to soar until the unfortunate events that took place on September 11, 2001. In order to prove this point, the author, Dan Gillmore, lays out a quite brief, yet thorough, history of journalism.

I think I will start by re-summarizing the history of journalism according to Dan Gillmore....

Ben Franklin was one of this nation’s first personal journalist, as well as my man Thomas Paine and the writers of the Federalist Papers. Journalism really took off with the beginning of the Postal Service and the Telegraph. During the 19th century newspapers, owned by folks like Pulitzer and Hearst, were extremely biased, so muckrakers emerged who worked out off the mainstream media and avoided objectivity.....time passes....Broadcasting comes along. Television networks that started as a public service soon turned into greedy whores. They preferred showing violence and entertainment because those led to the best ratings. Then Ted Turner gave us CNN. Radio call-in shows happened and finally...computers. If this text taught me anything, it taught me that personal computers and the internet started way before I thought they did. I am going to let everyone know how ignorant i am in admitting that i have not the slightest clue how computers or the internet work, but i feel that this article did indeed teach me a little bit more about these mysterious entities. For example, I learned that World Wide Web is not just an the title we gave to the internet; typing in www actually has a purpose. So, though the article goes on to explain more innovations in the history of computers, I really don’t get it enough to put it in my summary.

....I am now done with the summary.

Ultimately, what Gillmore is saying with this article is that by 2001, all the necessary entities were in place for blogs to be the new flourishing source of personal journalism, and the events of 9/11 gave people one big push to get started. Gillmore however, fails to address in any sort of way whether this new turn in journalism has had positive or negative affects. I don’t have an answer to this either, but i do wonder if these new “sources” of information are sourcing out a lot of wrong information, inciting a lot of anger and panic with untrue facts. But then again, major information sources such as newspapers and television networks are no more truthful or informative, they just have a bigger and shinier mask to hide behind. Like Dan said, rarely do i learn more from the news on channel 7 then that there was another shooting in Bell, Mariah Carey might be pregnant, and the weather tomorrow is going to be between 60 and 70 degrees (which never a surprise considering its California). So...

......that the end of my precise.