NYRblog - Russia's New Media Paradox - The New York Review of Books. Russia’s democratic opposition gets a lot of criticism from political observers for failing to convey its message to ordinary Russians.
No doubt this owes in part to the overwhelming dominance of the country’s political space by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his supporters as well as to general political apathy. As authoritarian states in the Middle East erupt in popular uprisings, the Russian public continues, for the most part, to be resigned to its political leadership. In a new poll conducted by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), 61 percent of respondents said they take no interest in politics or public life, up from 39 percent in 2007. The liberal oppositionists clearly face an uphill struggle in trying to reach beyond the circle of urban educated people who comprise Russia’s small online community of bloggers and activists.
But they have by no means given up. This will not be an easy task. Government corruption is of course old news for Russians. Minding Russia: The Simtelligentsia. I think few of my friends who follow Russia or *are* Russian, or few of my Second Life friends who follow SL politics or are *in* SL would find this encounter (transcript below) comprehensible, taking place as it did in the intersection between these two, well, virtual worlds.
I've been meaning to write about Russians in Second Life for awhile, and what a disappointment it has been. Knowing a foreign language is supposed to enrich your life; using Second Life with its affordances to have "hands across the sea" and all that is also supposed to enrich your life, yet often, the resulting effect is underwhelming. There are reasons for this -- chat in SL isn't in fact a place where misunderstandings disappear; I find if anything, it burns in stereotypes. Perhaps the beauty of it is that it is not possible to war -- with anything than a pixel gun or a sim crash, anyway. I don't mean the problem of Russians who hustle. But Russians are different. And not just GUM or St. Then came an IM. Wiki journalism: are wikis the new blogs? On Thursday I’ll be presenting my paper on wiki journalism at the Future of Newspapers conference in Cardiff.
As previously reported, the full paper is available as a wiki online for anyone to add to or edit. You can also download a PDF of the ‘official’ version. Based on a review of a number of case studies, and some literature on wikis, the paper proposes a taxonomy of wiki journalism, and outlines the opportunities and weaknesses of the form. The following is the edited highlights: A taxonomy of wiki journalism There are key qualities that must be identified when examining the use of wikis in journalism: Based on variations in the above, we can identify five broad types of wiki journalism: This taxonomy can be mapped out as follows: This taxonomy is not definitive, but indicative: it is possible, for example, to have a second-draft wiki that was ongoing (infinite), but the suggestion is that this would be atypical.
Strengths of wiki journalism Jay Rosen (2006) explains it as follows: