One of my BIGGEST sources of moti­va­tion of start­ing this blog, (besides major encour­age­ment and help in get­ting this blog up and run­ning, from one of the most incred­i­ble peo­ple in my life, Andre) is a this post by Ethan Zuckerman.

His post walks us through a Lok­man Tsui’s PHD Dis­ser­ta­tion on Global Voices and the peo­ple behind it. He takes us through three mod­els of jour­nal­ism, essen­tially, how we need to move away from the cur­rent mod­els and towards objec­tiv­ity as a key jour­nal­is­tic value towards HOSPITALITY.

Lok­man pro­poses that “the inter­net has chal­lenged us to rethink and re-imagine jour­nal­ism and democ­racy” and we have not yet done a good job fully uti­liz­ing its poten­tial. If we then com­pare media to pol­i­tics, where polit­i­cal democ­ra­cies have func­tioned best where they rep­re­sent a broad range of inter­ests, opin­ions and peo­ple, why then, can’t media be rep­re­sen­ta­tive and as hos­pitable, offer­ing a space for conversation?

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“Why has hos­pi­tal­ity slipped away? Is it because we’re expe­ri­enc­ing the false inti­macy of a glob­al­ized world? Lok­man sug­gests that we’re see­ing a para­dox of choice emerg­ing online — as we’ve got more choices, we often make deci­sions that iso­late and cocoon our­selves. Part of this may come from the biggest way in which we iso­late our­selves — we restrict the flow of peo­ple across national bor­ders to a much greater extent than we restrict finan­cial or cul­tural flows. Per­haps we’ve become bet­ter at acco­mo­dat­ing a person’s CDs or movies, but less good at acco­mo­dat­ing the per­son her­self.

This means that hos­pi­tal­ity is a duty and an oblig­a­tion, but that we shouldn’t pre­tend that we can pre­vent exclu­sion from some spaces.”

- Ethan Zuk­er­man, Lok­man Tsui on hos­pi­tal­ity, jour­nal­ism and Global Voices.

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All that being said, I would hardly imag­ine to call myself a jour­nal­ist, but, I, at the very least, am going to do my part to offer this s p a c e for con­ver­sa­tion, and share my opin­ions.  I truly believe that hav­ing our ideas out there is becom­ing increas­ingly impor­tant in a con­nected world. So here’s a lit­tle back­ground on myself and what I plan to use this s p a c e for.

I have some­thing to say. Do you?

Thumb­nail Pic­ture Credit: Uploaded on Decem­ber 3, 2006 by :petra:BadInternetSorry!!!