Alternative, counter-hegemonic and user-generated

Another blog (sort of) about Twitter... I really haven't started using it that much more but it really made me think about our discussion of counter-hegemonic and non-mainstream news (and tv programming) sources. If we term news and tv content with more general word, say "source" it becomes a conversation about information. Information creation, reporting, sharing, and dissemination.

My primary concern is with how few sources of information there are - in any kind of media. A potential problem that I think is very easily alleviated by the internet. The issue of homogeneity is almost ridiculous when we think of how much information - how many sources there are online. "Independent", different, not widely known, and user-generated are the major characterizations I think of when I think of internet sources. Blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter!) and YouTube videos and facebook statuses and link sharing are all news sources, it may be possible to replace mass media entirely with these technologies. And as Sturken points out, all of these new technologies are forcing media producers to realize that consumers are "occupying smaller, niche audiencs that muts be addressed according to their specific tastes, interests, and language groups."

It's very similary to the way that advertising on SpikeTV is not directored towards me (and therefore I find some of their advertisements utterly ridiculous), or the same way that day time advertisements during prime soap opera times are directed towards house wives. You can focus your RSS feeds to give you just what you're looking for, and at the same time you can browse friends' feeds and even try a sampling of random feeds.

Internet technologies like Twitter are incredible in their potential to facilitate information dissemination, just take a look at this article about a corporate cover up of toxic-duming in the UK. "By dawn in Britain, the words Trafigura, Carter-Ruck and Guardian, often accompanied by the # sign that enables Twitter users to click through to collected tweets on a tagged subject, began to crop up on the site, elbowing their way into the top-10 trending topics by midmorning." People who didn't know what Trafigura or Carter-Ruck were soon found out from their fellow Tweeters.

And yet, many people are still rather reluctant to catch on to all these new forms of sources, with the main argument being "what's the point in having multiple (source) accounts," i.e. why get a Twitter and a myspace and a LinkedIn profile, too, if you already have your facebook account? To that, I argue that our social networks count as sources of information, in fact they might be the first thing checked in the morning and the last thing looked at before shutting off the computer for the night. Or maybe its the one app we can't stop checking. I find it more disturbing that we worry about all our media and news coming from the same threes sources, but aren't too concerned that our entire lives are on facebook.