Thursday 1 February, 2007

Life online

There's an article by me in this week's New Matilda. Here's the beginning of it: 'A few weeks ago some hackers 'stole' Justice Michael Kirby's identity to create a presence on the social networking site, MySpace. As The Age put it, 'The identity thieves posed as the Australian judge to put sordid and sexually charged material on a fake Justice Kirby profile page.'

While there is no doubt that the use of Justice Michael Kirby's personal details was offensive, so was the breathtaking ignorance of the article's next sentence: The case, which MySpace said could be the first confirmed instance of malicious identity fraud on the site, underlines the flimsy or fraudulent nature of much of the internet's so-called 'citizen journalism.' Kirby's identity thieves were not bloggers -- although that is what the article means by its smug and ironic use of the phrase 'citizen journalism'.

Mainstream media can be as dismissive as it likes, but so-called 'citizen journalism' is becoming more and more people's journalism of choice. It is fair to question the lack of editing and fact checking on the internet, and the partisan nature of many blogs -- but then the mainstream media is looking increasingly shaky on those fronts as well, just read any Caroline Overington column. . . .