Enter World: exploring mediated cultures

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Women Blog.

Back in March of 2005 I wrote about the mass media’s emphasis on male bloggers in Who’s afraid of the white male blogger?. Today I ran across a Pew study that backs up my assumptions that the blogospehere is not male dominated.

This excerpt from WIMN’s Voices sums it up rather well:

Listen up, corporate journos: time to stop reporting on all those “here’s a photo of me on a picnic with my pet fluffy and a Photoshopped Lindsey Lohan” stories about bloggers. There’s a more socially relevant story to be told. A small but growing (blog readership and blog ownership have increased dramatically in recent years, Pew shows) army of young, racially diverse, fact-checking bloggers - half of whom are women, and a nearly a third of whom are politically motivated - are engaging the public debate every day.

This Pew study doesn’t only shed light on the demographics of the blogosphere - it raises some very basic questions about the demographics of sources quoted in corporate news reports about blogs. If bloggers are approximately 50% female and are racially diverse, why are white men still the majority of bloggers quoted and discussed in print and broadcast reports about blogs (that is, reports not focused on porn, or on predatory threats to girls with MySpace accounts)?

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

CNN’s coverage of “open media” formats

In a criticism of updated content in Wikipedia, CNN details a play by play of changes to information on Kenneth Lay’s death. What they fail to mention is that open-source journalism in formats such as IndyMedia encourages readers to take self-responsibility in fact checking—something we should all do with corporate media as well. The benefits to open formats for such information ARE the changing, the fluidity, and the multiple sources. These are not downfalls ...

However, that it was the encyclopedia rather than the “news” being updated is strange.

But the real question is ... did he fake it?

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Are documentaries the new zine?

When the copier became an accessible means of production, waves of activists began using them to self publish and connect with others through zines. With Google Video and other methods of sharing video without high production and distribution costs, documentaries seem to be more common and more outspoken. Are documentaries this decade’s activist communication tool?