Mainstream Idiocy

The article I found for this week I chose mainly because it strikes close to my daily activities, my eHome if you will. I spend a large amount of time on sites such as Youtube and tumblr, and the subject of today's blogpost, Twitter. I'm not going to lie and say I spend a whole bunch of time on Twitter, but there are certain people I follow and so I visit the site somewhat frequently. And since I don't use any of these sites as social networking, this article struck an even better chord with me.

Anyway, here's a link;

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/10/tech/social-media/twitter-osama-death/index.html

A guy, live-tweeted the infiltration of Osama bin Laden's compound and the eventual killing of bin Laden. Ok, so beyond the absolute hilarity of that, I think its pretty interesting. One, he was able to use technology not only to inform the rest of the world of the "secret" events that happened in Pakistan that night, but also to accurately figure out the parts he couldn't see by messaging other people around town. I like to think that that's sort of a spit in the face of all the near-ancient people that claim technology is corrupting the world. Two, I think it is pretty cool to have a pure confirmation that Navy SEAL Team Six did indeed kill bin Laden that night. But really these are just random musings of a teenager completing an English assignment.

That being said, the article brings up one more subject. I find this subject to be the most interesting by far, as it brings up a subject that we deal with nearly everyday but often don't see while it stares us down and shoves thoughts into our heads. The man who live-tweeted the events last year was named Sohaib Athar, and he brought up a debate over this concept of a citizen journalist. Whether or not he was a journalist didn't really matter to me though, it was what he said after identifying himself as a citizen journalist. Athar said that mainstream journalism wasn't really that impressive to him as he was thrown into that world where news corporation scrambled to get exclusive interviews, offered money for the story, and most importantly Athar said  the international journalist painted an inappropriate and inaccurate picture of what was actually happening. The journalists focused on what would get them the most readers and thus not only unfairly brought attacks on conservative Muslims, but also missed a greater part of the story. Things like this not only make me pretty angry, but remind me of things such as the yellow-dog journalism of the late 1800's that lead to  the Spanish-American war. I mean, really? Journalists whipped up the public into forcing a declaration of war for what? A couple of sales on the streets? That sort of thing is not only completely stupid, but incredibly unethical. This sort of thing influences the public in such a large way, and no one seems to care. We know that we are only getting the inflammatory and exciting parts of the story, but we miss a huge part of what actually is happening! Why do we continue to let ourselves take in what isn't necessarily faulty information, but definitely not the whole picture and then expect to have an unbiased opinion?

I will never stop loving nanalew, meekakitty, or livelavalive.