Social Media are vital for independents

Social media have become an important part of journalism. Newspapers today are still struggling to figure out how to best engage its audience through Facebook and Twitter. (Protip: Please don't spam my feed with 10 links to stories all within a few minutes.)

But social media are important for businesses, and even more important for independent businesses. Little Independent is a Chicago-based online marketplace selling independently made items. Since its launch in June, it now features stores in Illinois, Indiana, Delaware, and Massachusetts.

Social media is an integral part because this online marketplace encourages communication among independent retailers.

Lesley Tweedie, the founder of Little Independent, spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle and said this:

"I was traveling out of state recently and had dinner with an independent retailer I connected with on Little Independent's page on Facebook. Although I had never met her in person, we had an instant connection as owners of small retail stores."

I think Little Independent has come about at a good time. Most people my age I know do most of their non-food shopping online (I am included in this). While there are brick and mortar stores, it will likely grow the most over the internet.

The Occupy Movement on Tumblr

When I'm not doing homework or playing video games, I'm generally on Tumblr. It's a (highly addicting) microblogging platform and growing social network. It's filled to the brim with gorgeous pictures and snarky comments, but I've also seen more about the Occupy movement on Tumblr than I have anywhere else.

The tumblr tag for Occupy Wall Street updates fairly frequently, which means people are always talking about it on tumblr. People post silly comics, their stories written on a large card, and serious discussions. People are bitter, and people are serious.

I would sooner trust the ordinary people blogging about their thoughts and experiences of Occupy Wall Street than the NYT (which completely changed its story about protestors being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge on Oct. 1).

But why has Tumblr become the perfect place for people to discuss Occupy Wall Street? From my experiences, most people on the microblogging site are somewhere between 15 and 30 years old. Most are in college and going into debt, out of college and still in debt, or looking at colleges and already worrying about debt. Many supporters of the movement are young, and Tumblr is full of young tech-savvy people. Picture posts are an important part of Tumblr, which could be why so many posts in the past contained people writing their story and then writing "We are the 99%" at the end. People reblog the posts in solidarity, but they also then share their own stories.

I'm interested in seeing how this movement will grow on Tumblr. Will it be able to advance the movement, or will it be a place to vent about the 1%?

Animals + Humor = Profit

Back in '07, Businessweek did a piece on successful bloggers bringing in a nice amount of money each week, probably through advertisements based on the large number of hits they receive. My favorite of the week included I Can Has Cheezburger, which I actually stumbled on in 2007 with my sister when we saw our friends posting pictures of cats with bolded internet-speak phrases. Since then, we've loved all LOLCats. I haven't seen as many truly "laugh out loud" pictures as I did when the site was growing (some people think they're funny when they're really not), but I still chuckle at some pictures. But really, I just like looking at pictures of funny animals.

Which brings me to my next point. (Wait, are these really points? I think I'm just talking about how I like pictures of fuzzy animals. Or not fuzzy.) The silliest things can become hits. Two years ago in my Intro. to Mass Media class, we looked at F U, Penguin. It's just a guy putting cute animals in their place. This all started on blogger, but by some chance, it caught on and now the guy has a book.

And there's another that I discovered recently on tumblr: Animals Being Dicks.

However, for every goldmine, there have to be hundreds of flops. A lot of it is being lucky, especially with the sites I mentioned. Sometimes it's for fun, and then sometimes it catches on by accident and lets you quit your day job. Will I ever be that lucky? I doubt it. But at least there's a chance that maybe someone out there will like an inside joke I have with a friend.

Globalization and independent media

Globalization is a hot word for both people who are staunchly for it and for people who are staunchly against it.

However, if there's one thing globalization is good for, it's aiding independent media. With the rise of the internet, the world has started to become one global society and promote communication between countries.

South Africa, like many other African countries, struggles with authoritarian powers used against its people. The longer a ruler stays in power, the more likely he is to become a dictator.

However, independent media can resist that. If independent media are able to prosper, Africa's multi-party system can last."

But this can be applied to our two-party system as well. When either party becomes too strong, too weak, too unconcerned with its people, independent media turn to new movements. Independent media is all about change, and change for the better.

However, like economic troubles here, the independent media in South Africa have problems starting up. The person in power often postpones granting licenses or makes it too difficult and costly to use the printing press.

That's why we need to be aware of what's happening in other countries. We may not be able to help them, but we can encourage them to keep going. Their democracy can come about with the help of independent media.

When the news stops being the news

The Russian history lover in me needs to speak.

Journalism will never disappear. Someone will always need to give out the news because as much as people tell me that current events bore them, they still want to know basic things like, "Why is the red line on the D.C. metro always under maintenance?" and "Why was I-81 backed up for hours?"

And that stuff is important, too. But sometimes I think people try to avoid the news because they don't like politics and discussing politics can only bring you trouble (unless you're like me and enjoy that part).

But when I turn on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, or any national broadcast, I wonder how much people question what they hear. The news is supposed to be impartial, yet each of these stations has its own agenda. From Bill O'Reilly to Keith Olbermann (despite his move to Current TV), opinions are treated as news, and news is treated subjectively.

There's also each time politicians try to quell WikiLeaks, such as when Senator Lieberman got Amazon to drop the muckraking site.

In the well-known Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism by Laurence W. Britt, one point centers on the media.

6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.

And while learning about the dissident press, I was surprised to learn how many American communists were involved in the news, crying foul at the world. In a way, I shouldn't be surprised because I've always been enamored to a degree with communism.

However, many people aren't aware of how strictly the press was controlled within the Soviet Union. Not only did use Stalin use the propagandist Pravda to his advantage, he would purge anyone in the Communist Party who did not follow a line of Stalinist thinking. In one part of Slavenka Drakulic's book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed--the majority of which takes place in Eastern Europe before the Soviet Union's collapse--Drakulic tells the reader about a journalist she knew who wrote a piece that did not go well with the Communist Party even though she was a member of the same party (all journalists had to be members of the Communist Party). She wasn't blacklisted, but everyone in her newsroom ignored her from then on.

Drakulic also describes a time when she had a chat with her censor. He wasn't there to tell her that she was writing anything that the Party didn't like; he just wanted to show her that they were always watching. After that, Drakulic didn't need a censor. She had enough self-concern that she was her own personal censor.

A controlled mass media doesn't point to strictly fascism nor strictly communism. It's not about whether the media are too far right or too far left. What people need to know is that a free press and a totalitarian government cannot coexist.

Independent media haven't really changed

Of course, there have been hundreds of years in changes to technology, changing how the alternative press delivers its news. However, its core values are still very much in tact, and the summary of the first part in Rodger Streitmatter's Voices of Revolution offers readers the primary reasons for a dissident press. They...

• speak on behalf of the oppressed
• face financial hardship
• receive neither sympathy nor support from the mainstream press
• have an open forum
• are active proponents of change
• have impact
• have timeless issues

Much of this reminded me of lambasted modern independent media, such as WikiLeaks, which is repeatedly attacked by the mainstream press even though they are doing a service to the world by providing information that politicians and large corporations would rather keep secret. And this is only one example; there are plenty of others.

Independent media are also forward-thinking. The feminist paper The Revolution, by Stanton and Anthony, covered many women's issues, but they covered one that is still controversial today: abortion.

The Revolution argued that "it was not moral degeneracy that led a woman to end an unwanted pregnancy...but sexual exploitation by the man who had impregnated her."

It's no surprise that this was considered a radical idea in the 1800s; to some, it's still radical today. Stanton and Anthony were activists who wanted to give voice to the voiceless. They wanted--and needed--to change the idea that "A woman is nobody. A wife is everything." The mainstream press attacked them, calling their paper "Amazonian." The mainstream media even personally attacked the women's character, calling them hermaphrodites because they defied social norms.

And yet, they did not let this bother them. They were giving a greater voice to a democracy that needed to be improved (by including women's voices) while the mainstream press were slow to realize that women had the same rights as men. Of course, the majority believes in equality today, but the modern mainstream press is still slow to recognize social and political problems today that everyone will recognize years from now.