I can still clearly recall about two years ago, a fire incident took place in my previous campus. There was no injured victim or serious damage caused by the misfortune. Interestingly, merely few hours after the occurrence, a senior of mine posted a video recording of the fire evacuation process on his YouTube account. It was very efficient of him to post the raw footage up to the video sharing site almost immediately after the actual event happened. This would not have been possible without the existence of new media. From the perspective of a media student, his act of capturing the event and sharing it as a piece of information is considered as a form of citizen journalism.
It is no doubt that the emergence of citizen journalism sprouted from new media. Glaser (2006) explained the term ‘citizen journalism’ as a form of reporting by individuals with no professional journalism training, who utilize modern technologies and Internet as their tools to disseminate information. The reporting can come in forms of blogs, pictures, pod casts and videos; basically, new media.
New media has been proven to play a significant role in contributing to political shift in the Middle East countries. Many street protesters recorded the anti-government rallies and uploaded them to social networking and video sharing websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for the rest of the world to see. These amateur footages were also aired in Al-Jazeera and gained worldwide attention on the political issues in the Middle East. The abdication of Egypt’s president, Mubarak would have never happened without the help of Facebook, Twitter, Google and YouTube, as expressed by Wael Ghonim, Google executive and cyberactivist, who is also a supporter of anti-government protests in Egypt (Relaxnews 2011).
Internet allows information to be disseminated interactively to individuals across the globe with no hierarchical and geographical boundaries. With these characteristics, Internet has the power to dissolve political control. Internet provides access to social networking sites that act as a platform for individuals to interact with each other to identify and discuss societal issues, and make a change to political situation; also known as public sphere (Habermas 1991). Raboy and Dagenais (1992) added by stating that media act as agents of social communication by which a crisis is made public, and the media-crisis relationship is the key factor in the struggle for democracy. Internet is undoubtedly a major contributor in supporting democracy in political practice.
In local context, alternative media namely, MalaysiaKini and Malaysian Insider serve as platforms for Malaysian citizens to champion freedom of speech and encourage the society to be vocal in expressing their opinions on political matters.
References:
Raboy, M and Dagenais, B 1992, Media, Crisis And Democracy: Mass Communication and the Disruption of Social Order, SAGE Publications, London.
Relaxnews 2011, Social media, cellphone video fuel Arab protests, viewed 8th June 2011, <http://techcentral.my/news/story.aspx?file=/2011/2/28/it_news/20110228100840&sec=it_news>
Habermas, J 1991, The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Buroeis Society, MIT Press, United States, viewed 8th June 2011, <http://books.google.com/books?id=e799caakIWoC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false>
Glaser, M 2006, Your Guide to Citizen Journalism, Media Shift, viewed 8th June 2011, <http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/09/your-guide-to-citizen-journalism270.html>
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