New Media – Power to the people or threat to stability?

New media defined by dictionary.com is ‘any interactive media, esp. electronic mass media combined with computers’. In this case, we are looking more closely at the Internet. I agree that the Internet is indeed ‘power to the people’, but it only becomes a ‘threat to stability’ if people act on the various ideas without considering the consequences of their actions. The Internet is able to provide many different portals in which people can express themselves. Examples would include youtube, livejournal and blogger etcetra. Furthermore, there is no need to expose one’s true identity to express what he or she has got to say online. Yes, tracking is possible but it’s not an easy task and it will take a lot of time to track just one person on a global platform. Thus the Internet is indeed a powerful tool to not only to express one’s ideas or opinions but also spread them and attain support.

The two articles given hold different focal points with regards to New Media and Free Press.

In my opinion, both are valid. The first article by Mark Klempner says that the Internet though providing much junk known as cyberslime still has opinions, information or claims that are worth reading and thinking about. The people who post on the Internet can be broken down into several categories. For example, journalists, individuals who just gives criticism and opinions heard (students like us who have to do this for homework fall under this category) and extremists who are serious about making themselves. The major difference between these groups of people is that they express themselves in differing ways. Journalists have to be careful about how and what they are writing and thus they may not be writing what they really feel because their jobs are at stake. Individuals who express themselves using platforms like blogger do not have the intention of letting many people know what they really think. What they write about may be along the lines of passing comments. However, as compared to journalists these comments are true and come from the heart. The extremists from the third category are usually desperate to attain support for they think and thus may distort or exaggerate facts. Furthermore, they may use words of manipulation to convince the readers.

I’m not claiming that only the opinions of the individuals from the second category are reliable but people especially youths who form the most tech savvy generation should learn how to differentiate between truth and biased opinions on the Internet. No one is completely right and some degree of thinking must be done before accepting what he or she has said. If this is exercised then people would not act irrationally on the ideas that are presented on the Internet and cause social problems.

Yes, the Internet is currently used by the various terrorist extremists organizations to gather supporters and members and it falls under the ‘threat to stability’ category. Although this problem may not be solved on a short termed basis but the ideas and solutions the government has come up with to counter the organizations will work on the long run. Youths should be educated that not everything on the Internet is correct and they should also understand that reality and the virtual Internet are two different dimensions altogether.

Arguing or debating whether the Internet benefits or harm the society more is useless as I believe the Internet will always exists and even if the Internet was to be ‘destroyed’ or shut down in the future, there will always be people who have the technology to create another system similar to the internet. There are benefits of the Internet that affect everyone positively but as for now countering the negativities such as people who use the Internet to create chaos is the only thing any government can do.