Comparative Analysis
The modern society has witnessed the rapid development of new technologies that altered the nature of human communication and information exchange. The impact of these new inventions has stretched from everyday interactions between friends and members of the family to such global issues as political journalism. This paper will compare two articles devoted to the relationship between user-generated content and journalism. It will explore how these papers treat the concept of citizen journalism and study the similarities and differences in approaches employed by the authors. Both articles are written by Jönsson and Örnebring (2011) and Wall and El Zahed (2014) study the principle of user-generated content and the way this content can compete or co-exist with traditional forms of journalism. However, the perspectives of the authors are not the same ones; and they come to different conclusions.
The articles have several similarities. Both researches agree that the role of new technologies, such as the Internet, mobile communications, and etc. significantly influence the development and intensification of user-generated content. Wall and El Zahed (2014) argue that Facebook and small YouTube channels were the only media that had been used to communicate the important and uncensored information about the events happening during the Syrian Revolution. They also highlight that these technologies were so important that the state decided to ban them (for example, the Facebook ban in 2011) as the powerful sources of information that could damage the government’s image. Discussing the degree of user participation in the process of creating content Jönsson and Örnebring (2011) also highlight the following fact. Such technologica