The future of journalism is quite a broad vision. It’s always exciting looking into the future. Mankind has been obsessed with it for ages. We always want to anticipate what’s to happen to us and around us. But that would completely rob us of the element of surprise; yet another human obsession. This blog itself is already quite futuristic if you ask me. What the hell does anyone really care about the ambiguous things I have to rant about anyways?
I think it can go two ways:
Those people who are obsessed with hearing their own thoughts, and just want to rant and not listen to what others have to say, will just continue to do so. Given the power, they will surely cause more segregation among our communities, and it will just become one giant “bitch-fest”.
Then there are those people who truly appreciate the term community. People who have been raised to respect others around them, and understand that listening to one another is crucial. We live in larger societies than before, and reaching everyone is easily possible with technology. But the various number of opinions and interests means that more specialized groups will emerge.
Specializing and innovating can be a good thing or a bad thing. I am not one to say. However I do love creativity. And my greatest hope is that journalism will continue to take on more unique forms. While I support the arts, and I do enjoy entertainment, I think that they should only be a secondary element in journalism. While it is important to capture the audience, it’s more important to inform them. At least that’s what I thought the point of the free press was. Give people the raw information. Make it innovative but without preconceiving it for them. We should treat our audiences as intelligent individuals, and not be so concerned with spoon-feeding them, or dumbing things down for them. If anything, we should expect the audience to become sharper, and we have a role to play in that.
Special interest groups and media convergence will continue to affect the future of journalism. Maybe journalism itself will be broken up into sub-genres that will be completely viewed as autonomous industries. Or, is it fair to say that journalism as a career may become obsolete?
Structure is important. We live in a time where our resources and modern technology are making things happen faster and we have easier access to everything. Somehow that makes me feel smaller though, and very confused at times. Our generation was brought up to be as explicit as possible. The generation before us fought hard so that we could have this freedom of expressions, but now it seems like it’s lead to other sorts of restrictions. Like guidelines for example. Even in school; teachers are asking us, “does this exercise work for you? Is my teaching effective?” We already know that technology has had major implications on the way we get our information, and the way that we learn. They say that we are the Internet generation; nothing can limit us. But I think we are given too much confidence. I really can’t say what will happen, and honestly I don’t want to know either. I am a pessimist however, so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
