The Daily Me

Beware! Fellow bloggers and net citizens. A new trend of audience/reader behaviour has emerged, it is the wide spreading in the internet world. This new phenomenon is known as 'personalization'. If it is about news selection, then there is a name for the 'newspaper' created by the owner him/herself, that is the "Daily Me".

As it sounds, the "Daily Me" is a newspaper owned personally by an individual, or in other words an electronic publication of the owner's creation. This is an obvious change in the matter of receiving information and messages. Information and mesages used to go through the process of filter and editing before both elements are transmitted to audience/readers through a media. This change of audience behavior seems to be a blessing to the audience, but it has its own setbacks.

First of all, audience/readers restrict themselves to news topics or television/radio programmes which they prefer. By doing this, they don't get diversed inforomation. People who are fussy and lazy will be getting very little information through the media. They can simply choose news topic or programmes according to their appetite. Most teenagers prefer reading entertainment news to reading about politics or community-related articles. Under the concept of the "Daily Me", they will come across much less topics of disccussion which they're not interested in. However, if they read printed newspapers, they may come across an article on a country's election. Somehow, they may be attracted by the pictures of the report and start reading the news report.

The habit of only exposing oneself to limited sources is unhealthy from both the social and psychological perception. We learn more if we are keen in having a wider scope of reading news and watching programmes. That is why I think the audience and readers will lose a lot general knowledge if they only read and get to know about issues that they are interested in. At the end of the day, audience and readers become 'gatekeepers' themselves. This I consider as an awkward and eerie situation. This is because a majority of audience and readers do not receive education on mass communicatios. Therefore, they lack the capability to filter a diversed combination of news topics or broadcast programmes professionally.

This will be a major setback in the effort of promoting media education to the audience and readers by media organizations. Although I have to admit that the rights of audience and readers for having a say in what kind of information they would like to receive, but I would still insist the importance of educating the audience and readers. The main reason behind this is that common people do not 100 percently know what informations are useful and beneficial to them. I would love to stress that this is indeed a fact that can't be overrruled.

Lastly, in my humble opinion, I feel that it is only possible and suitable for the "Daily Me" in a society where 90% of the citizens are intellectuals and possess basic knoledge on editing information. However, this seems to be a Utopian future to me, yet me still can try our best to achieve this goal which would somehow benefit us as audience and readers.