Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

190 Online Journalism
While the inherent flaws in censorware will not prevent them
from finding customers regulatory legislation is a more difficult
proposition. The huge amounts of small bits of information that
comprise a network at any moment make it impossible for ISPs or
sysops (system operators) to police messages in the way that a print
publisher or broadcaster does. If the legal role of publisher devolves
to individual users does that entirely remove any responsibilities
about content from ISPs? For the purposes of defamation or
obscenity the traditional conception of publishers’ liability needs to
be completely rethought.
Filtering software promises a more insidious attraction. Like the
Daily Me and other pull-media, it can offer news consumers worlds
in which information about terrorism, disasters and hatreds is
simply screened out. All news can now be good news, or sports news,
or entertainment news. It could be argued that such partial constructions
of the world are hardly exceptional. Prior to the mass media the
informed individual belonged to a small elite which excluded large
elements of the population, often including women and the poor.
The world views of the information-unenfranchised, however, while
they were collapsed to the village or even the household, were not
usually distorted by such a systematic erasure of whole topics. The
fragmentation of mass-media forms, already advanced by the midtwentieth
century, enabled consumers to become more specific
about their media consumption; newspapers were designed to allow
them to discard easily the sections that they were not interested in,
radio addressed quite specific interests, but it was still difficult to
avoid the news completely. Cable television and the deregulation of
radio encouraged a further diminution of that public space but it was
with the arrival of the web, which allowed consumers to select all
their media to be delivered in one package, that they had the power
to switch off everything that they did not want to know about.
In his book Data Smog David Shenk sees the trend as entirely
contradicting any notion of global consciousness and the web as
leading instead to a parochialism which while it is as efficient as a
library cataloguing system, since it cannot offer the serendipity that
such systems offer their users as they wander the stacks, is radically
divisive. Shenk’s ‘nichification’ leads to increasingly narrower
domains, walled and gated global villages populated entirely by
Marxists or Republicans, pagans or stamp collectors. Perhaps these