Dissertation Blog #3 - Blogs, Bloggers and the Whole World of Blogging

Ethics is no longer the basis of my dissertation.

WHAT?

Last Monday I attended my regular E-Publishing seminar, in which fellow students and I discuss “the nature of electronic publishing and electronically published material, looking at the range, type, and style of e-published materials.” This particular week we discussed blogs, bloggers and the whole world of blogging. We discussed the pros and cons of blogging over print media and whether or not blogging could be considered a threat to print media, which is when little bells began to ring in my head. The question “Does blogging and microblogging mark the end of traditional print journalism?” evolved very quickly, I went to research my question further, and was surprised with how much information was available and how genuinely interested I was in the subject.

HOW?

The joy that is Google Scholar, I’ve found many texts relating journalism and blogging thanks to Google Scholar - Weblogs and Journalism: Do They Connect? by Rebecca Blood and Is Blogging Journalism? by Paul Andrews were both good starting points, and I’ve also taken out some books from the library recently, as shown in the video.  

WHY?

Before this academic year began, I’d never blogged before, nor had I ever been subscribed to a blog, so I thought my knowledge in blogging would’ve been no greater than the next person, but while discussing blogs and further researching blogs, I realised the information was completely relative to the world of video blogs which, as previously mentioned, I know well, so in many ways I feel like I’m coming full circle. While I’ve turned my back on ethics being my primary subject, it’ll be more than possible to weave it into discussion, will weblog journalism be more or less ethical than print media? In online journalism, advertising is likely to be a point of discussion, as freelancers cannot make money from blogging otherwise, so how does that affect the publisher’s content? Does that have any particular affect on the readers and their perception of journalism? For now these questions shall remain unanswered, but they’ve helped me in making things clearer now and I’m confident I’ll have a proper title for my dissertation by the time of my next entry. Fourth week in, and the pressure is slowly building and my nerves are increasing. The size of this project is becoming more obvious and intimidating, but I have no choice but to see this as a good thing.

Dissertation Blog #2 - A Question of Ethics?

From now on, my videos will be scripted beforehand, I promise!


As I say in the video, I've begun to wonder whether it's possible or not to discuss both journalism and advertising within web 2.0, providing they are branches of a different topic, and yes, last week I was speaking exclusively about YouTube, and while my dissertation will still concentrate on YouTube, I think there's no avoiding discussing Twitter and Facebook. The way I see it at the moment, if I were to write about ethics within web 2.0 then I could write about journalism and advertising as sub-topics. Having said that, I wouldn't be able to write in great detail about journalism and advertising in case of going too far off topic.


This whole way of thinking has derived from the only useful text which I've read this week, and that's Ethical Space - The International Journal of Communication Ethics. Typically, I didn't even find it, I received the link via email (Thanks, Andy.) Below is only a small section of what led me to think differently about my dissertation; 

"When Iraq’s former President Saddam Hussein was executed in late 2006, news media in many
countries rushed to put images of him on their front pages and at the tops of their bulletins. As
well as exposing the West’s double standards about images of dead people and its misunderstandings
of the cultures it seeks to control, those shocking images highlighted the media’s obsession
with commercial ratings and circulation battles. Perhaps they also expressed the media’s need to
mark symbolically what had been achieved in America’s invasion of Iraq.
But in every account of Hussein’s death we could devise, consideration of the Internet’s global
reach and power will loom large, and ethics will lag far behind. As the media commentator
Professor Roy Greenslade noted, the news media were rushing to play catch up with social
networking sites such as YouTube, where cell phone images of the execution were circulating
almost before news editors and media relations teams had caught up with the event. ‘The raw
information had circumvented the traditional instruments of control,’ wrote Guardian reporter
Dan Glaister."


It's a thought, anyway.


Bibliography


Matheson, D., 2007. Why ethics should be at the heart of the Internet debate, Ethical Space – The Internet Journal of Communication Ethics

Dissertation Blog #1 - The Beginning of the End

Many people would have expected a blog from me last weekend, the first in a series of blogs chronicling the first steps in writing my dissertation. Those people were sadly disappointed - I never posted my first blog. Blame the Ryder Cup and Wales' unpredictable weather, that's what I'm doing anyway.

Major sporting events are no longer a distraction, so my dissertation from now on will have my full attention.

After the two hour lecture last Friday, I felt that I was one of the only students who had more than an inkling as to what my dissertation would be about. In the broadest of broad senses, my dissertation is going to be about YouTube. I could write about journalism and its relation to YouTube, that being more relevant to my degree, but I could also write about advertising on YouTube, something at first I think has more content to discuss in detail, though I may be wrong. It's over these next few weeks that I hope to specify my title.

Why YouTube, though? Well, YouTube is my second life and has been for the last four years. I am in every sense a ‘YouTuber’, someone who is part of a social community consisting of other YouTubers; we post videos to one another, ask each other questions, respond to each others’ queries, help each other out in increasing viewership in hopes of securing a YouTube partnership. It sounds weird from an outsider’s perspective, but it’s surprising how engaging this world can be. In thinking of writing a 10,000 word essay about YouTube, I feel obliged to bring the YouTube community into my project; ask them for their opinions and thoughts, be it through comments, tweets or video responses, so I have opened a new account where I’ll post videos discussing my dissertation under the pseudonym Oliver Oakdale. 

I apologise for my lack of ability to write creatively, I hope that will improve over the coming weeks. I’ll stop now before I begin to bore us all.