Is reality becoming more real? The rise and rise of UGC

a) Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information".

b) new technologies in 1991, Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him, tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by an onlooker from his apartment window. The home-video footage made prime-time news and became an international media sensation, and a focus for complaints about police racism towards African-Americans.

c) Asian Tsunami on December 26th 2004
London bombings on July 5th 2005
shooting at Virginia Tech
Mumbai bombings in India in late November 2008

d) UGC is 'user generated content. It is not necessarily professional and therefore sometimes lacks credibility.

e) A gatekeeper is defined as someone who controls access to something. It also refers to individuals who decide whether a given message will be distributed by a mass medium.

f) "The way around the gatekeepers is with the independent media on the web. The blogosphere, for example, provides an opportunity for independent, often minority and niche views and news to reach a wide audience. In fact uniting disparate people in ‘micro-communities’ is one of the web’s greatest abilities. How else would all those ice fans communicate without the ‘Ice Chewers Bulletin Board?’ And the only place for those who like to see pictures of dogs in bee costumes is, of course, ‘Beedogs.com: the premier online repository for pictures of dogs in bee costumes"

g) It is likely that in future there will be fewer and fewer permanent trained staff at news organisations, leaving a smaller core staff who will manage and process UGC from citizen journalists, sometimes known as ‘crowd sourcing.’

Some believe that the mediators and moderators might eventually disappear too, leaving a world where the media is, finally, unmediated. This does raise concerns however. Without moderation sites could be overrun by bigots or fools, by those who shout loudest, and those who have little else to do but make posts The risk of being dominated by defamatory or racist or other hate-fuelled content raises questions about unmoderated content: ‘free speech’ is great as long as you agree with what everybody is saying!