In the early hours of this morning I was listening to the ‘Most Annoying Celebrities Of 2007’ television programme as purely background noise whilst I was reading the end of a book I got for Christmas which I was totally gripped by. As I finished my book the next celebrity that was on the programme was Vanessa Hudgens from High School Musical and they were discussing her nude pictures scandal. Perez Hilton was talking about it and branded it a blatant publicity stunt and pointed out that her publicity department could have easily denied her responsibility and her actions but they confirmed it was her in the pictures, obviously trying to lose her sweet image from High School Musical. I found this quite interesting anyway as I had already been shown the pictures by my flat mate and we had found the whole thing very amusing but what struck me as more interesting is that, on reflection, I had never questioned if these pictures were actually her or not or why they had been released into the public domain.
As the internet is such a huge information portal it is often hard to find any objectivity online. We have information on any given topic at our finger tips but rarely do we consider why it is there or what it is offering us. In his book ‘Amusing Ourselves To Death’ Neil Postman discusses Aldous Huxley’s vision of the future in comparison to George Orwell’s famous ‘1984’. Orwell talks of an external power that oppresses us whereas Huxley feared a society where we invite so much information into our lives that we become our own censors and lose our sense of self like the victims of Orwell’s Big Brother. Huxley’s vision seems to be coming more and more prominent in our society that has nearly all the information in the world on the computer in their front room but instead they choose merely to check their emails and Facebook and then log back off.
Through the internet we have the potential to be truly active audiences, writing blogs, creating films, broadcasting our views but the vast majority of us are not harnessing the powers we now have access to. We all should have freedom of speech online and we can create a ‘global village’ where we all care and support each other, creating a true public sphere where we can freely discuss the problems in the world with each other but instead we are still a passive audience in a large respect. With the introduction to the internet we quickly became swamped with a choice of information sources and new uses of this technology that offer so much that many of us simply choose the security of our favourite websites without venturing any further. Rarely do we question if we are being manipulated and how our sense of self, the politics we understand and the community we live in being corrupted by our online experiences. Many of us have a strong sense of fatigue with the world, a world which seems to be growing in its visibility everyday with more and more people logging on to the internet and so we stick with what and who we know.
Websites such as Wikipedia allow us to learn with the rest of the world in a huge mixing pot of knowledge but in reality would we instantly believe what someone in the street told us about a particular topic or would we seek far further proof whilst many people believe the information on Wikipedia with little questioning. Wikipedia itself warns against ‘significant misinformation, unencyclopedic content, or vandalism’ which it acknowledges can be found on its pages however quite a lot of this information is not explicitly incorrect and so could easily be mistaken for truth. With Wikipedia specifically most people know not to automatically believe it but through other far more repuatable websites such as The Guardian online there is now a prolifence of blogs from their journalists which many people will not think to question the objectivity of the work whilst the pieces will tend to be very personal and subsquently very subjective.
Surely this new subjectivity is all part of our online identities but it is so important to question what we read, like we should in the more traditional forms of media that we are exposed to. We must remember that everyone online is not a professional and that they may be trying to corrupt us in some way and online there are not the same legal guidelines to adhere to as there is through more traditional methods of media such as broadcasting and print media.
Sources Postman, N. (1987) Amusing Ourselves To Death. Methuen Publishing Limited, London.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
