'Big Brother is reading your blog' response

There has been an increase in the number of people using internet as social networking. Some of the most commonly used social networking websites include blogger.com, facebook.com and myspace.com. Nowadays the users are concerned about their privacy as there have been reports on sexual predators and identity thieves prowling social networking sites.


Teenagers now use organized social Web sites to meet others and explore identity formation. These sites can be viewed within a larger trend that shifts the influence of interpersonal correspondence to mediated messages.


These sites play a key role in youth culture because they give youth a space to hang out amongst friends and peers, share culture and work out an image of how they see themselves but some of the users use these sites for illegal purposes.


I think and agree with the fact that companies and schools should come up with soft wares that prevent personal information being sent via these websites some of such softwares include SAP and IBM. These soft wares help us monitor blog and hopefully in future avoid the cases of sexual predators and identity thieves.

Citizen Journalism- Shreshta

Citizen Journalism is when the public uses the web to report on news and current affairs. This is a process where the citizen collects, analyses, disseminates and reports news and information and therefore is called a journalist. These citizens then develop or join websites where people carry out a similar process. Some of the websites are blogs, you tube, my space where they create their own media. The importance of this theory is that everyone has got an opinion and this process gives them the right to share it with others.


“The term generally is understood to mean a collaboration between a professional journalist and his/her readers on a story, where readers who are knowledgeable on the topic are asked to contribute their expertise, ask questions to provide guidance to the reporter, or even do actual reporting which will be included in the final journalistic product.”


The main advantage of having such websites is that citizens can report local events and issues that the local main stream media ignore. If a member thinks that other citizens should know about a problem the government hasn’t solved then these work as an outlet to publicize news.