Brian asked this question on the BBC World Have Your Say and I wanted to address it, there was “no discussion about gender divide, conversely how new media can improve gender/social and other inequalities,” Others will follow.
There isn’t a gender or socioeconomic divide per se but there is a literacy divide. The citizen journalist requires access to two things: literacy and access to the Internet. Unfortunately, literacy tends to go hand-in-hand with socioeconomic plenty. The perceived gender divide on the Internet and in the blogosphere has as much to do with literacy (or the lack thereof) as used as a form of oppression (and supression) against women and the poor with anything else.
Even assuming that there isn’t a digital divide (the socio-economic difference between communities in their access to computers and the Internet) prohibiting women and the poor from accessing the Internet, there is the issue of being able to effectively communicate.
On the Internet, you are what you write and your effectiveness has a lot to do with the quality of your writing (or in the case of podcasts and video blogs, your speaking) and in the tradition of the pre-Gutenberg Roman Catholic Church, keeping people subliterate and illiterate is an excellent way of keeping them subjugated. Of keeping us subjugated.
When the Catholic Church lost control of being the official word of God by losing control of the Holy text to both literacy and the printing press, the entire spirit world and world of religion shifted and changed.
This same power shift (who controls the text, who controls with word, who controls reality and who controls culture) is happening to Main Stream Media: MSM has lost control of the Press.
To citizen journalism, to blogging, to fisking, and to a bottom-up, grassroots, emergent news, reporting, and collaborative creation of the culture.
I am no visionary and my futurism skills are limited, but I do believe that blogging and citizen journalism is going to transform the world in much the same way that the simple creation of the printing press changed the world.
The fact that both companies that develop and produce the world’s most popular blogging softwares, Movable Type and WordPress, have names based on the cultural revolution known as the Gutenberg printing press.
MT and WP, I see what you did there.
