Online Dewey Response

Dewey's thoughts on the "public" certainly have a great deal of barring on today's online journalism. Dewey proposed that anyone should have the ability, and right, to be informed and to inform people on what is going on in the world. With the advent of blogs, twitter, camera phones and a whole slew of other new technologies, anyone can produce and consume news 24 hours a day. This allows everyone, from the Harvard educated businessman to the unemployed high school dropout, to be, theoretically, on an even playing field as far as being informed about the world's events is concerned.

This also creates an entirely new set of problems, however. Allowing anyone to post anything instantaneously creates and enormous margin for error. While there are certainly some extremely good non professional journalists writing on blogs, there are thousands more who are completely uninformed and posting things with no truth to them and presenting them as fact. This phenomenon has created an uneven playing field; allowing people who only read independent blogs to believe that everything they are being presented has been fact checked and researched and is not solely based on opinion.

While it is entirely my belief that everyone should have equal access to news and be able to contribute to the journalistic process, there needs to be a happy medium between media being for the elite and it going to the dogs.