Week 13
The beauty of the Internet is that it’s a place of free, uncensored, online discussion and networking. Sites like WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and 4chan essentially dominate the Internet with trending, unfiltered news; however, should these organizations follow the same code of ethics as modern-day journalists? Should they be responsible for what they’re reporting? Because of the nature of some organizations like Anonymous (who essentially can and do remain anonymous), the content they create as hacktivists remains unfiltered and unchecked. But, it’s important to note that these organizations have opened the frontier into a new era of journalistic transparency while still remaining controversial topics.
Powell touches upon an interesting argument while analyzing WikiLeaks, calling it a “phenomenon...[that] illustrates the interrelated elements of mediation, communication, and power, especially within the organizational structure of the network.” It’s no doubt that WikiLeaks is a powerful entity that was built from scratch to be a media company that “exploit[ed] the news production process”. WikiLeaks is, according to Powell, an organized network that dominates the Internet with what he terms as “new media power”. Similarly, both 4chan and Anonymous possess this similar kind of “new media power”, with their own innovative news processes disrupting the way regular news is produced. Adrian Crenshaw writes about Anonymous in his essay, calling it a “misnomer”, refuting the theory that Anonymous is a collective group, but rather a loose network of “shared memes”--cultural units that share similar ideas, according to Crenshaw. The way Anonymous, 4chan, and WikiLeaks operate as distributed online networks has paved the way into a new digital revolution, redefining modern-day news processes through the adoption of transparency as the new forefront of the revolution.
