Government vs. World Wide Web

For the federal government, regulating the Internet has always been a “swing and a miss.” One of the few successful laws to date has been the Children’s Online Protection Act, which regards the access to offensive content on the Internet on school and library computers (http://www.fcc.gov/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that relates to the following bills I will be talking about in this post. But most of the legislation put into place has caused uproar amongst Internet users.
The Internet is a black hole of endless information. How and can it be controlled? As far as the government’s concerned, they’ll do anything to try.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) were recent pieces of legislation presented to Congress that caused  immediate action from many subscribers and mainstream online organizations. Both bills pinpoint copyright infringement and piracy on the Internet by foreign websites. Websites, such as Wikipedia and Tumblr, initiated blackouts for awareness and protest of these bills. These blackouts were effective in killing the legislation. Both were exhausted.

The government’s attempts to regulate the Internet have not been completely effective, in my opinion, because of the following reasons: 1) The Internet covers every corner of the globe. 2) The Internet contains infinite sources. It will be interesting to see what the fed’s next move will be as Internet users becomes more of a watchdog.

Technology vs. Journalism

Journalism has come a long way since the 1970s' scandal of Watergate and boom of civil rights movements. Back then, newsprint was the way of finding things out. Today, there seems to be a falling out. Funding has been sparse because of news organizations’ dependence on revenue from subscriptions and sponsors. Modern technology and the age of the Internet has pushed print media under the radar. And with citizen journalists breaking news from every corner of the globe, is professional journalism still a need in today’s society? Or is this phenomenon slowly falling out?

Technology has morphed society into a fast-moving, progressive-thinking machine. A person can get access to almost everything with the right gadget and the proper execution. With the click of a mouse or the touch of a smart phone, people are able to consume news for free from around the world.  This accessibility has caused a bit of restructuring for news organizations. They are now forced to adapt to modern technology.

The World Wide Web has become the ultimate source for information. Journalists on truth and originality when reporting their stories. Not all information found on the Internet is reliable. A news organization is responsible for its own reporting. Information published through print media is scrutinized at a greater scale than anything published on the web. There’s a greater expectation of telling the truth.

The Internet has also produced a mass population of citizen journalists that can publish stories online through various blogs and social media. No longer are people relying on journalists to provide them with information when they can do research of their own.  But journalists are still relevant today, although not in the same way they used to be during the uprising of investigative journalism. To say that they’re a vital part of today’s society is questionable. People just need to trust that journalists will provide them with the most accurate version of the truth. As for adapting to technology, print media is working its way to a happy medium with online versions of their newspaper and more interactive features with videos, graphics, and sections for readers' feedback.