The Importance Of Community Newspaper Website Managers

In today's society there's a new update on how journalism is delivered and written. Through the power of the cyber world new context is being uploaded and videos are being uploaded to video websites such as YouTube. Three authors express their thoughts about this modern-day problem in a traditional way, via textbook. They discuss how social media websites deliver messages that are not very accurate and informative. These messages usually target certain groups to create a community of its own.

In the essay Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt, by Julie Zhou, her thesis is “But the law by itself cannot do enough to disarm the internet’s trolls. Content providers, social network platforms and community sites must also do their part by rethinking the systems they have in place, for user commentary so as to discourage- or disallow- anonymity.” Zhou’s thesis is located in the first two sentences of paragraph nine, on page 89. 2. The issue Zhou addresses in this essay is trolling on the internet.

Even though the world may seem small, we have a larger community than most can see with their eyes. The internet blinds people from the dark abyss of deceit, lies, and secrets but it is gradually

There will always be a few things that a person does not feel comfortable with about their own body that leads them to hide it. These things could be aspects of their identity or their physical features that they feel must be hidden away in order to fit better into the mainstream. In his essay, “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights” Kenji Yoshino discusses the effects “covering” has on marginalized groups in the United States. He defines “covering” as the ability “to tone down a disfavored identity to better fit into the mainstream” (Yoshino 294). In her essay, “Alone Together” Sherry Turkle discusses how the pervasive use of technology like “online communities” is detrimental to people. She worries that with frequent use of technology that people will begin to become indifferent to authenticity in their everyday lives. Both authors worry about whether individuals will unite regardless of their covering or their excessive use of online communities or not. Individuals are pulled further apart from each other due to their excessive use of virtual worlds and covering of their identities.

In theory, the Internet provides gender-neutrality and anonymity. Research studies at the University of Amsterdam hypothesized that the “concealment of people’s identity would foster gender equalization.” However, that is not the case, and their findings indicated that “only when group members are depersonalized (anonymous and not individuated) does stereotype activities produce gender-stereotypic behavior” (Postmes). Anonymity online inherently does not equal gender-neutrality. In connection with the motive studies, women and men, when activated and stimulated, fit the stereotypical mold for expected online interactions and its adversities. Women often will stick to online communication and avoid offensive

These online websites become very secretive and very private, considering the whole reason for these sites is to get away from the rest of the world, a place where members do not have to lie and can "let it all hang out". People in a small town also have very tightly knit communities and are completely separate from the rest of society. Outsiders are not welcome. Nobody knows the entire extent of what is going on inside of a small town and that is the way they want it to be. Although similar in the fact that the small town is “impenetrable”, it is very different in the fact that the there is nowhere for the members of these types of communities to escape and truthfully express themselves without repercussions, like the websites previously mentioned.

Monica Anderson and Andrea Caumont investigate how social media sites are reshaping the news and their effectiveness in engaging their audience. The authors posed five questions in their article, considering how social media users participate in and discover news, as well as the impact of social media on discussion of news events. Anderson and Caumont found that social media users are very likely to share news stories, discuss the events, and even share their own coverage of a news event. They also found that users often spend more time on a news site if they arrived there directly, rather than through a social media site. Finally, the authors state that social media can stifle one’s willingness to share their own opinion and discuss a news event. The authors obtained these conclusions by utilizing data from the Pew Research Center. This source is useful to my research topic as it sheds light on the ability of social media to encourage discussion of news stories.

The words community and conversation both have concrete definitions. The definition of community is a group of people that either live together or share a common characteristic. A conversation is an exchange of ideas through spoken words. In the article, titled Technology, Neil Postman states: “how the words 'community' and 'conversation' are now used to mean, simply, people with similar interests, a considerable change from an older meaning...” (53) Postman is implying that these two words have been extended and redefined. The introduction of social media and the Internet have redefined the terms community and conversation.

( Paltrinieri, 2013) Social is a form where common based prosumerism actually promotes civic engagement. On social media people will build relationships based on mutual interests and trust. This creates cohesive groups which also are motivated and ready to be mobilized to support social causes. ( Paltrinieri, 2013) However, this does not just stay on the internet it also can go out into the public. Online the consumers can criticize and discuss events that are currently happening in the world. They can actively give their opinion about those matters. They do not just read about the news, they actively take part in the production process of the

The role played by anonymity in facilitating inflammatory online interactions is thought to be mediated by group processes such as that of deindividuation (Festinger, Pepitone & Newcombe, 1952; Demetriou & Silke, 2003; Zimbardo, 2007), commonly described as a state of reduced self-awareness typically associated with immersion in a group (Goldstein 2002). The social identity model of deindividuation (SIDE) (Reicher, Spears & Postmes, 1995) postulates that when the members of a group are anonymous, less attention is paid to the differences between group members at an individual level, while more is paid to the common ideologies and attitudes of the group (Postmes, Spears & Lea, 1999), resulting in group polarization

Communities are all about groups of individuals who share something in common. This makes going on the internet seem like an odd way to find more communities, form new ones, or strengthen pre-existing ones. The internet however is full of communities. Communities can be based upon religion, location, ethnicity, an interest, or a personal matter. The internet itself is “a global distributed data communications network” (Kirmayer, Raikhel, & Rahimi, 2013, p. 166). This is what makes the internet so full of communities because communication is the key to putting multiple individuals with commonalities into communication, which is the basis of any community. Online communities differ from communities that exists off the web in a couple of

The spiral of silence theory (Noelle-Neumann, 1974; Noelle-Neumann, 1993) proposes that individuals fear social isolation and only therefore speak out in public if they perceive themselves to be in the present or future majority on an issue. In order to assess the climate of opinion, people closely monitor their social environment via the mass media. The effect of

Gatekeeping is about the decisions made by journalists or media companies through policy; therefore, we must look at what influences those decisions. Gatekeeping as an idea has a number of factors that influence what information is presented and why (Soroka, 2012). Since finances is a key part of any business and there are still those who attempt to limit the audience’s access to information online, and they do so for financial reasons (Taneja, 2013). The editors of small community media are more concerned about revenue than those at larger publications (Donhue, Olien, & Tichenor). There is an argument that can be made that gate-keeping decisions have traditionally been based on financial considerations (Tichenor, Donohue, Olien, & Clarke, 1980; Soroka, 2012). Research has shown, at least some community media outlets, that editors make decisions about what to publish based upon some influence from the expectations their advertisers and fear of alienating the community and therefore the publication’s subscribers (Tichenor, Donohue, Olien, & Clarke, 1980). This is because community media cannot exist without advertisers (Kennedy, 1974); therefore, it would be counterintuitive to anger and alienate users. This leads to a situation where it can easily be conceived that the same economic factors would impact gatekeeping decisions on the web.

According to psychologist John Suler and his idea of “The Online Disinhibition Effect”, some people, while online, self-disclose or act differently than they would

Social network sites (SNSs) such as such as Friendster, CyWorld, and MySpace allow individuals to present themselves, articulate their social networks, and establish or maintain connections with others (Ellison, 2007). These sites could be used for work related situation, romance, connecting with individuals with shared interest, or creating a connection amongst college students. Facebook enables its users to present themselves in an online profile, accumulate ‘‘friends’’ who can post comments on each other’s pages, and view each other’s profiles (Ellison, 2007). Individuals can write on the wall of friends, send private message, comment on posts, as well as chat via instant messaging. Much of the early research on online communities assumed that individuals using these systems would be connecting with others outside their pre-existing social group or location, liberating them to form communities around shared interests, as opposed to shared geography (Ellison, 2007).