My mother stood in line for four hours last week for a flu shot. A diabetic woman ahead of her in line passed out because she’d been there so long without any food.
Thousands of people (to include myself) stopped swimming in the ocean a couple of years ago when there were so many publicized shark attacks.
Not to mention Y2K, weapons of mass destruction, and anthrax...
And now…the Bird Flu.
Fear is a way of controlling and lulling the public into compliance and trust. If it is a slow news day you are almost guaranteed a new public fear will be discussed on all of the news programs.
Flu shots are not running low this year (and really, haven’t we all managed to survive the flu at some point in our lives?) Shark attacks were not higher than any other year and the Bird Flu is highly unlikely to be caught by one or two people in the United States, much less the entire population of news viewers who are now doing everything the news says to prevent and prepare for a possible outbreak.
This is the “top down” approach that Brian Carroll discusses in “Culture Clash: Journalism and Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere.” On any given night you can turn on the news, any of the news channels, and hear the same stories – sometimes given in the same order. We all know more than that has happened, but because of the filter through which news travels these are the chosen tidbits of knowledge we are allowed to know.
Blogging cuts out that filter. It allows knowledge to spread like a virus through the participating community. Key words in that sentence, of course, are participating community. Like choosing a television news program, the blogger and the blogger’s audience chose each other based on similar ethos. There are distinct “communities” of bloggers based on common links, and therefore common readers. This is no different from a viewer choosing CNN over MSNBC? When a blog reader chooses a specific blog and when those bloggers chose each other they are choosing an individual voice through which to participate in a conversation with, rather than a corporation whose aims and agenda are not to report you the news but to get you to watch and draw in advertising dollars.
Blogs are all of the following things: commonplaces for individuals and communities, diaries, opinion editorials and news information distributors. They are an eclectic bunch of individuals portrayed in cyber space who either chose to discuss themselves and those things relating specifically to themselves, or they are a voice – still individual- commenting on or simply relating events and stories that they chose to relate. There is still a filter there its just made up of an individual and the readers that chose to participate rather than a hired staff who are required to attend bi-monthly so called “ethics” meetings or are following a set of guidelines that determine what is to be shared with the public based on those wonderful advertising dollars again coupled with the numbers of viewers and their demographics.
The short unedited style of blogs are like a conversation and the interaction that occurs between the blogger and their audience keeps the blog and open ended dialogue. It’s dialectic in the blogoshpere – a way for all voices to be heard. Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker, in “Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as on Online Research Tool” stated,
“The weblogs were originally used as a way to keep our focus while online, serving as constant little reminders of the real topics we were supposed to write about. They soon developed beyond being digital ethnographers' journals and into a hybrid between journal, academic publishing, storage space for links and site for academic discourse.” (250)
Blogs are essentially a way to cut out the middle man and the large red bow of bureaucracy that keeps information as a commodity or product with which to sell to an information hungry public. A public that will not go in the water if you say there are sharks, and a public that will remember last years flu shot shortages and believe you when you say you absolutely need a flu shot and will run out and stand in line for four hours based solely on residual fear.
What about the advertising done on the blogs though? It seems, right now, that the blogger still has editorial control and the advertisers don't effect the content, but will that change? Will blogging become a business just like television news has?
For now though, blogs act as thought engines online, available to the public to invite questions and open discussions as to what we, as a public, really think. In fact, blogs invite us to think again – to think out loud in large public forum, rather than alone in our living rooms sitting in front of the news and wondering in our minds whether or not we will get the bird flu.