Harry Brogan's Blog

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/we-asked-8500-internet-commenters-why-they-do-what-they-do/

Everyone loves to get feedback on things they create and find out what people liked and were not so fond of, right? You would think so, but in the case of online journalism community feedback has proven to be a very tricky subject.

Many a platform has decided to remove their comments, generally due to the fact that it doesn’t contribute anything to the conversation – however hate speech is definitely not an unfamiliar sight for anyone with a presence on the internet, since merely being in the spotlight can make you a target of online trolls.

Unsurprisingly, the targets of such hate comments often have something in common. Race, gender, religious beliefs and sexual identity are some of many things that could put a bounty (so to speak) on a journalist’s head. One might wonder why this is the case, but the answer could boil down to one simple thing: human beings replicate behaviours that they see in others.

For example, the modern world has no shortage of oppressive governments and world leaders full of prejudice; take Donald J. Trump or Kim Jong-un, two people in charge of entire nations.

You would think that the head of a country should be the cornerstone of their community and use their platform for invoking positive change, however what do these two do instead? They oppress the people of their own countries which periodically normalises such behaviour, causing potentially millions of people to follow suit in thinking that is an appropriate way to act.

This creates quite a dilemma, with extremely old-fashioned ways of thinking resurfacing while other parts of the world take large strides in the right direction. Returning to the human behaviours point, this is where more impressionable people will assume that this behaviour is ethically right.

This is where the comments come in. What better platform to share hate speech than one that can be entirely anonymous? Journalism is now so deeply rooted into the internet that it is near impossible to just have a magic fix for this problem, which leaves publications and freelance journalists with two choices: leave their comment sections as they are or remove them entirely.

Removing comment sections is nowhere near the end of the world though. In recent years, many large and successful publications such as Reuters and Vice News have decided to lose comments and have noticed no abrupt change in readership, while other publications took the approach of heavily moderating their comments, be it through an advanced AI or paying community moderators, in order to continue to allow the community to share their thoughts without having to be exposed to the warped thoughts of an internet troll.

Online journalism has always had its fair share of hardships, but with time comment sections will hopefully only become more inclusive safe spaces to discuss any number of topics, allowing readers to get several sides of a story and not just the one that a journalist told.

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The story behind this sequence of photos is that they were all taken during the same day, where I spent the first half in Kingston and the second half at home in Buckinghamshire. I thought it would be an interesting contrast to show the switch from morning to night in two different locations.

Mornings in London tend to be a lot different to what I’m used to, in both the visual sense and the things you come to expect. Things are a lot less natural looking, and you can definitely notice the amount of people condensed into a smaller space, but that carries its own little charm.

Kingston definitely holds more greenery than most parts of London as you can tell by this daytime photo, making it feel a bit more like home than most other places closer to central London. Despite this, most of what you hear in the day is children playing or the bustle of main roads rather than wildlife.

Upon getting home in the afternoon, I noticed a strong difference to Kingston in that it is completely silent most of the time, which is a welcome change for me. I definitely value quiet sometimes so it is a nice escape from assorted noises around the clock.

Pete was my first friend when I moved to California. We did everything together for about a year. I remember telling him like he can always call me if he needed help with anything. So I was pretty open to it when one day he asked me to come across to Nevada with him, which was about a two hour drive. Just to get some stuff that his dad left for him. So we went along and I thought everything was fine, it's just like a road trip. And we went to this like motel area and I remember thinking ‘okay, this looks a little shady’, but also he wasn’t the most wholesome guy so I thought this was just his normal, everyday dealings. We left the motel around 45 minutes after and I didn't see anything weird, he just put stuff in the trunk and got back in the driver's seat.

We were driving for about an hour and there had been a cop car behind us for half of that time. And then they turned on the siren so we had to pull over. And apparently they were following us from the border to Nevada. Unbeknownst to me, Pete had in the car with him around $60,000 in stolen electronics, and he also did have a couple grams of marijuana at the time which wasn’t stolen, but it was illegal in this state. So I sat in the car, I was almost in tears as I did not want to go to prison, especially in like a foreign country as I am originally from Canada and only in California for like a year. I just said there, and the cop, he came and told me to get out of the car. He said he wasn't going to arrest me, which was a relief because that would have probably broken me. 

There were a few things that contributed to my final decision to study at Kingston University, but I will start primarily with the location. I wanted to study within London, without dealing with the repercussions of living in central (rent, crime, masses of people). As such, I looked to other locations a bit further out within London, and eventually settled on Kingston.

The low crime rate definitely helped put me at ease, but also the location right alongside the river was also a nice feature. As for reasons that swayed me to the university itself, the fact that it is quite renowned in the journalism field made me more comfortable with my decision.

Finally, the language scheme offered at Kingston sealed the deal for me, since journalists knowing a second language is definitely an asset that would come in handy.

Unit 10, which was focused on Japan, was our first project of the second year of this course. We were given the freedom to go down whatever path we wanted, as long as it tied in with the theme of Japan. This is definitely a topic of interest for me, so I was quite interested to research and develop my ideas.

I decided to focus on the topic of Japanese mythology, as I have always found it quite fascinating. It was very enriching for me to look into the various stories and gods that have become folklore in Japan, and it was interesting to look into the ties to other religions such as Buddhism.

Upon completing my research, I had decided that I wanted to create a print, as well as a set of stickers. This proved to be quite challenging, as two of the gods that I chose to focus on did not actually have any portrayals that I could find, so I had to create them using the small bits of information I could find. 

As research for this project, we took a group trip to London. The day involved us walking around, looking at various different street artworks and shop windows to help support our development. While most of the trip was guided, we were given opportunities to walk around freely, which I dedicated most of my spare time to looking at graffiti. The graffiti I managed to photograph was very unique and will help me to progress through the project.

Towards the end of the trip, we looked around Selfridges to get a grips of how shop floors are laid out and displayed. This was very helpful for the fashion side of this project, as we are going to be designing and creating our own shop windows. I found that a lot of the displays ranged from quite standard to very over the top, usually depending on the clothes that are being displayed (and their price).