Online Journalism - Ayo Menulis FISIP UAJY

8
The (Re)construction of Reality:
Local and Global Journalisms
The Internet is a potentially powerful vehicle to mitigate and ultimately
change [social] dynamics. It is an empowering and
engaging means for personal exploration and expression. It is a
medium that enables one-to-one communications, communications
‘up’ and ‘sideways’, not just ‘down’, [and] it offers the
opportunity for an improved means for people to identify and
discuss amongst themselves the concerns of interest to them. 1
History can be viewed, perhaps over-simplistically, as the story of
humanity’s long struggle to escape social and political despotism. The
lasting protections from oppression won in the course of that struggle
tend to have been those embedded in and guaranteed by the social.
A by-product, or perhaps the main determinant, of humanity’s innate
sociality is the protection afforded by the group. Accordingly, tyrannies
of all sorts, including dictatorships and those based on
commodity forms, try to reorganise participation and association
away from the social and around themselves. The monopolies of the
age of mass media encouraged the atomisation of society and its
adjuncts, including the family, through ever-increasing layers of
mediation. A television in every room of the house became the guarantee
of full (and spurious) sociability. The move from TV to
interactive media, perhaps web TV, appears to enable a reversal of
that trend and enables new relationships, implicitly political,
between groups and individuals. As media technologies converge on
the web the world, or at least those elements of it that can be appropriately
mediated, reconfigures itself in a new set of relationships.