The Badger Herald: Opinion: Get ready for new media

Opinion

Get ready for new media

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Also by Joelle Parks:

FFRF campaign unacceptable stunt (December 8, 2005)
Affirmative action has no place at collegiate level (April 13, 2006)
Falk neglecting issues in attack ads (October 25, 2006)
Not just another word for nothing left to lose (August 8, 2005)
Rep. Green's comments have merit (December 13, 2005)

Wednesday, February 9, 2005 12:00 a.m.

3 Vote 0 Votes

Blogging, the newest Internet craze, reveals all the Internet is cracked up to be and more. Or is it less? Not familiar with the term “blog”? Short for “weblog,” it is an online diary where a person can confess his or her deepest and darkest secrets, among other things. The only problem is that his or her deepest and darkest secrets are also available to the rest of the world to read and comment on.

There are many different places to blog — some personal, some scholarly, and some political. So if everyone can read a person’s commentary, who would write confidential or false information that could potentially cause problems? More people than you think.

There are blogs for everything. There are even blog search engines. Do people really have so much time on their hands that they can sit at their desk all day, online, blogging about everything from religion to sex? Apparently so, because if you type the word “blog” into Google, it will bring you to 172 million different blogging websites.

Even professors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are blogging as a means to better communicate with their students. It is another way to help students learn from each other. It is beneficial because it connects students to one another and allows them to converse in a completely different setting than the classroom.

But in a classroom, there is a certain level of respect and courtesy not commonly found in blogs. And in class, you can see and hear who is speaking and judge the reliability. Students not enrolled in a specific class can also observe and communicate in these blogs, sometimes revealing false information. It can be disturbing when a student relies on the blog for an answer to a question about an upcoming exam, only to find out the information given was false.

There are even blogging scandals in politics. Here’s a quick re-cap from CNN regarding George W. Bush and Howard Dean’s relation to blogging: Armstrong Williams, an African-American conservative columnist and TV host, took $240,000 from the Ketchum Communications PR firm under the Department of Education for the United States to promote the No Child Left Behind Act for Bush.

The Howard Dean campaign hired two well-known bloggers — Jerome Armstrong, who publishes the blog MyDD, and Markos Zuniga, who publishes DailyKos — to praise him. The difference is that Dean’s bloggers disclosed their arrangements and supported Dean before and after they were paid. Williams did not disclose his comments and criticized the No Child Left Behind Act previous to being paid. He exercised poor judgment in this decision, but the rest of his columns (which are not traditional blogs, to be sure, but which are heavily read online) were in no way, shape or form paid for by the Bush administration. Unfortunately, because of this flaw in decision making, his career is gone.

False information, false people — there is no way to tell the difference while blogging. Blogging is just one more example of how technology is a double-edged sword. It can be extremely helpful but also extremely damaging. Aristotle once said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” In doing so, blogging can remain a tool in our lives and not take it over.

Joelle Parks (parks1@wisc.edu) is a freshman intending to major in journalism.

3 Comments | Leave a comment

Anonymous | February 9, 2005 8:56 AM | Reply

Wow! Way to jump on that "blogging" bandwagon...just like Zuckerman yesterday. Is the Herald like, a year or two behind the times on purpose?

By the way, typing "blog" into Google and counting the results is the most insultingly lazy reporting ever.

Did you do any research on the impact of blogs? The readership levels? The ways they are changing media...like a lot? I heard none of that in this fluff piece.

If Joelle intends on majoring in journalism, she's got a lot to learn.

Anonymous | February 9, 2005 11:54 AM | Reply

It's Markos Moulitsas, not Markos Zuniga. He has an entire page dedicated to this fact because so many people have screwed it up.

Anonymous | February 9, 2005 12:22 PM | Reply

False comparison. Armstrong Williams took taxpayer money, to support Bush's policy and didn't tell anyone, and changed his opinion.

Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong didn't change their opinion of Dean and took private money to provide technical assistance with the web to the Dean Campaign and were completely upfront about it. They made it clear, on their respective weblogs, that they were being paid. Jerome Armstrong actually STOPPED BLOGGING during the time he was paid by the Dean campaign, so it's really hard to claim that he was paid to write about Dean.

It's despicable to even mention these two honorable men in the same story as Armstrong Williams.