14TH EDUKCIRCLE CONVENTION ON MEDIA COMMUNICATION
Reaction paper!
The focus of the 14th EdukCircle that happened last 10TH of September 2016, is the “Traditional Media vs. Social Media: Issues and Concerns”. Knowledge about it is essential to the Communication Arts and Journalism students of our generation. Aside from printed media, TV, and radio, an important and more effective medium of reaching to people is the social media.
I think what people really like about social media is that it offers freedom and anonymity. As a heavy social media user, I’ve noticed that the topic that most people argue about is politics. It’s good that people nowadays are knowledgeable about important issues, but it’s hard to filter just what type of information they’ll be exposed to. Politics, specifically issues involving President Rodrigo Duterte has really split the population of the country into two. Everyone seems to have an opinion about him and people are not scared to be vocal about it especially on social media. Ms. Kristine Sabillo from Inquirer.net shared how she was attacked on twitter after an unfavorable tweet. Online journalists experience most of these negativity, but normal social network users are not exempted. If you comment on an article expressing your dislike about Duterte, his heavy following will immediately attack and bash you. I remember reading about a girl being threatened to get raped after she reacted on a Facebook post about Duterte’s sexist statements. Some fan pages of Duterte screen captures negative posts about him, including the name of the poster so Dutertards can visit their account and bash them. Those are just examples but it has made me somewhat scared of stating opinions online, and I shouldn’t be. Everyone is entitled to freedom of speech. Sadly, lots of people are just mindlessly typing, without any consideration to how it would affect themselves, and the people seeing it. Even a simple post comes with consequences.
I agree with what Professor Rachel Khan said, that at a very young age, children should be taught in school that they should distrust what they see on the internet. There are parody sites and fakes news all over the web that uses shocking headlines to get clicks, more commonly known as Clickbaits. If you’re not critical or well educated about a certain thing then you might fall for these pranks. Some people wouldn’t even read the article before liking and sharing a link, thus disseminating wrong information even more. On Lourd de Veyra’s presentation, he showed just how important revenue has become to media companies. Some of them would choose to report unimportant or trivial things in order to cater to what people want, rather than what people need. Facebook, for example, uses robots instead of actual people when it comes to filtering these news. It’s not really effective but they argued that they are a ‘tech company not a media company’, so it’s not their priority.
I also realized that most people see Media as corrupt, which is an unfair generalization to people working in the media. There are always comments on news articles about how it is ‘biased’ and that it was paid. Ms. Sabillo did say that some good journalists quit because they can’t tolerate lying on their job so I supposed corruption do exists. But it should be the goal of media practitioners to tell the truth. Being honest also means that you can’t please all the audience so there will always be people who will disagree with media.
News about children and minors should be handled with care, especially those with very sensitive topics such as child pornography, and sex slavery. Minors’ identities should protected by omitting videos or pictures of them, their names, addresses, and schools attended. Even with these restrictions, it is still possible to tell the story effectively by just showing little parts of their bodies, or the place where the story happened, or giving them aliases. When it comes to getting statements from them, it could be done with a supervision of a psychiatrist or someone from child services. Violating these might result in serious damage to their life, so their safety should be the priority.