journalism – Corinna di Gennaro

[live blogging] My friend and colleague Lokman Tsui (@lokmant) is talking today at the Berkman Center about his current research: Beyond Objectivity: Global Voices and the Future of Journalism.

Global Voices is “a community of more than 200 bloggers around the world who work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media”. Why does this matter? The title of Lokman’s personal blog says it all: “Global Voices, One World”. Strangers can gather and discuss (the news) and form a public. Now with the Internet you have strangers you can connect to potentially everywhere. Habermas’ public sphere of coffee houses, Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’ capture well this agora formed by online communities. Looking at how the Internet is destroying journalism is a one sided interpretation. The Internet offers new opportunities, a globalisation of culture. Continue reading “Beyond Objectivity: Global Voices and the Future of Journalism”

I am currently at Oxford for a three day workshop on: “The Internet and Democracy, Lessons Learnt and Future Directions of Research”, which we at Berkman‘s Internet & Democracy project have been organizing in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together leading researchers to assess the current state of research on the impact of the Internet on democracy. In particular, the workshop aims to assess: (1) what are the lessons learnt from existing research? (2) How can we best measure the impact of the Internet and new media on democracy and what are the insights provided by different research methodologies? (3) What are the future directions for the field?

Please check this blog and the Berkman’s Internet and Democracy blog in the next few days for blogposts about the workshop sessions. A webcast of the opening lecture which was held yesterday by Matthew Hindman at the Oxford Said Business School will also be made available soon online both on the OII and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society website.