Until today I suffered from nodaphopia – fear of networks. If I used facebook or twitter or sat in a church or ate a family meal before, it was only because I hadn’t thought carefully about what any of those things really are.
I’m a student in the International Journalism MA program at City University. Today marked the start of our third week, but the first of online curriculum. Within two hours, the lecturer, Paul Bradshaw, and a producer for Sky News, Neal Mann, convinced me that the internet and social media will drive all future news reporting and almost everything else.
Reasons why this development seems bad: 1) I always liked privacy. 2) The amount of information and connectivity made available by technology is overwhelming.
I interned a summer at one of the last US newspapers to literally cut and paste stories with X-Acto knives and glue for layout. It took forever, and I loved it.
Now I can’t help but feel we’re headed into some Sleeper-esque world, where, as an Italian classmate suggested, journalists will only make love on their backs because they must constantly watch twitter feeds on their futuristic ceiling screens.
From there, it’s a short step to microchips in the brain. But as much as I may want to throw Nikes in the internet’s machinery or clog its fiber optic tubes with rubber cement, there’s no point.
Like any technology, this vast network of people and collection of programs should probably be viewed as tools—ones that can help journalists do their jobs better.
That’s what I will try to do this year: use these tools to find, investigate, and report stories.
I’ll chronicle that effort and the course of the journalism MA in this blog, alongside some self promoting.
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