Citizen journalism is not a very well known term, something I had never heard of before this assignment. However I currently follow many ‘citizen journalist’ social media accounts that I thought were just spreading awareness about issues. However from my research I have done about this topic I realised that it is the public’s dissemination of public interest within their respective countries or international issues too. By use of social media to rapidly spread information and possibly become an effective agent of change” (Zeng, 2019)
I believe citizen journalism is highly important for every country as it shines light on issues, topics and events that the media doesn’t cover or inform correctly. The use of social media for citizen journalism can be good as it enables an up to date and publicly available platform for all people with access to the internet to find relevant information. As stated by Mieckle and Young, “the value of a communications network increases proportionately to the square of the number of people that are connected to it”. (Mieckle & Young) this relates to how citizen journalism can have an impact because of the amount of people that use social media in this day and age.
South Africa, the place that I grew up, has a highly corrupt government. The third world country with a vast amount of issues like soaring crime rates, xenophobia attacks , violence against women and past race segregation apartheid problems, has a strong online citizen journalism presence. Many of which aim to inform and spread awareness about the ongoing issues in South Africa. I do believe that citizen journalism can obscure the truth, when misinformation is spread, however this is inevitable even with the media. However I believe that it can more often than not shine light on the whole truth and unveil the hidden actions by the media. For example, i follow an instagram page dedicated to raising awareness and spreading information about the brutal violence, killings and rape agaisnt women in South Africa. They post information about the whereabouts of suspects for the crimes as well as making sure that the women do not become another number in statistics within this issue. This is a powerful and productive way to protest and try bring about change by ordinary citizens.
In summary citizen journalism can have highly effective aspects and beneficial in South Africa, trying to do good and bring forth social change, spread awareness and infor. But also always has the ability to create false information that cannot be verified by any authoritative level when publishing.
References
Meikle G, Young S , ‘Broadcast to Social Media’ , Media Convergence: Networked Digital Media in Everyday Life, Chpt. 3 , pp. 59-78
Zeng X , 2019, ‘New Perspectives on Citizen Journalism’ , Sage Journals
Kyras blog 