Citizen Journalism

In the sense of communication, citizen journalism is essentially the reversal of professional journalism and media; while the public normally play the receiving ends of media, in citizen journalism, the public become the senders. However, what citizen journalism entails highly differs in that it has no boundaries: what the public sees is what the public shows. Moreover, ubiquity is what strikes citizen journalism as a massive media outlet; anyone with a simple recording device can participate, especially with many phones nowadays allowing for video recording (even now in high definition). With an aspect of media that is controlled by the public themselves, several concerning issues arise.

YouTube, as Google's video-media giant, has become the international center for citizen journalists. YouTube plays the intermediary role between partakers of citizen journalism and the rest of the public. Thus, when one visits YouTube and comes across the Neda video, for example, what is seen is simply just a "video." There may or may not be contextual information in the video description but even so, there is the issue of reliability and authenticity. In the most-viewed video of Neda's death, the user included a short description of the incident and claimed he and his friend who shot the video were witnesses. The video does depict Neda just before her death however, there is nothing from the video itself that suggests that she was shot. The viewer does not know how it occurred or what happened afterwards; while she is shown bleeding quite extremely, this alone would not be enough to conclude that she had died. Moreover, the viewer is unaware of whether it is an act or a real-life incident and does not truly know if what the user wrote in the description is true. This is the major issue with citizen journalism. While the video was confirmed by multiple sources to be authentic, before confirmation, viewers were simply assuming that what they were seeing was indeed real. This may prove to be a major problem when citizen journalism produces a video that is actually a stunt to draw attention to an incident that never actually occurred.

Despite the questionable integrity of citizen journalism, its existence has drawn the publics attention to issues that perhaps would never have been publicized through professional journalism (e.g. Neda's death and how it happened). Moreover, the absence of boundaries allow for citizen journalism to bring about issues that would be otherwise prohibited to publicize by regular media. Though having a society control journalism purely by themselves is quite impractical and unreliable, having a balance between mainstream journalism and citizen journalism may very well revolutionize the ways in which global issues become known to the public.