The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Friday, 20 July 2012

2011 MASS UPRISINGS: MULTIPLIED NEWS SOURCES AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE


I wrote this write-up for a research journal during May 2012. I am now publishing it on my blog in parts.

2011 MASS UPRISINGS: SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS - PART-IX

MULTIPLIED NEWS SOURCES AND MEDIA CONVERGENCE

Social media, while playing a significant role in spreading protests throughout the globe, has changed the dynamics of the news flow dramatically. And media convergence has made it possible.

In the news media industry, source of information is the main driving force. News production runs on the values like proximity, authenticity, validity and relevance based on the circumstance and genre of the news. 

Traditionally, organizational channels and news wires have been the main source of the information flow. The next big addition to it came from the Internet. 

Now no one can expect a newsroom without Internet and googled information. And social media is giving brilliant dimensions to this change especially in situations when proximity becomes more important than authenticity, as in cases of the follow-up stories.

We often come across reports that Twitter and Facebook intend to exploit the information flow through their networks to significantly alter the news industry and they have a point here to make, for they led the revolutions in the closed regimes like Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. They have started sounding significant in iron-curtained regimes like China, Russia and Syria. 

Social media has made a difference in countries where the traditional media is totally controlled. Social media mobilized opinion of millions on issues like corruption and corporate greed, considered dead issues not so long ago.

The last year was the year of the protester, a year marked by the protests when the common men took to the streets, from Tunisia to India, from Egypt to USA, from Canada to Greece, to protest regimes and to protest on issues. Most of the protests were operated in a way totally amorphous with no figurehead. 

Instead, there were so many heroes, unnamed, leading from the front, fighting in the streets and on the communication platforms, outdoing the regimes and the controls, by disseminating their stories of struggle, plight and momentary triumphs.

And convergence gave them the global voice. The human aspect of the media convergence blended so well with its technological and business counterparts - that it is going to be the next big thing in the news production industry.

Redoing the definition: Websites, print editions and television programming – on any given day, they all have multiple stories based on important Tweets.  Tweets form major chunk of breaking news stories these days and the trend effectively began with the Arab Spring.  

Hostile conditions for working journalists in these crisis hotbeds left very few international media persons there and the global media largely depended on the social media feeds by the protester on the street. That contingency measure looks well to become a model now. Right from the office of the Indian Prime Minister to the junk celebrities of Indian film and sports industries, to the global newsmakers, everyone has now microblogging presence and it is significantly aiding to the news pool of the organizations.

To continue..

 ©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/