I came all the way to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government to learn how to start a blog and maintain it.  Not quite, but that’s what it took for me to get up to speed on this endeavor.  Professor Mele wants one more post for his class.  This one, on the impact of the Internet on journalism and on government.

No doubt the Internet brings great benefits, but this semester I became even more keenly aware of the drawbacks of having such a powerful resource intertwined with our daily lives.  For starters, our loss of privacy.  Corporate America is gathering even more information about us than I could ever have imagined.  With every application that we download we lose control of one more bit of our personal data, and most of the time we don’t even realize it.  The same can be said for the Internet’s impact on journalism, it has some good contributions but also bad ones.

We know that the Internet has opened the door to new, diverse voices.  Thousands of new bloggers have added their perspective to the Internet.  But bloggers are not necessarily journalists, and many of them are not following journalism ethics and standards.  It’s now up to the consumer to discern fact from fiction.  Not everything that is on the Internet is true.  Additionally, consumers must be weary of new technology that filters searches – what you see is what Big Brother thinks you want to see (read previous entry on the filter bubble.)  There is no doubt that journalism is going through a critical transformational time, some have called it “the death of journalism.”  College students are selecting alternative career paths due to the uncertainty in the journalism career.  Nevertheless, journalism plays an invaluable role in our society that must be protected.  The long tail gives us hope that there will always be an Internet audience for good journalism.

As for government, it’s apparent that in the United States this institution is only now learning how to deal with the Internet.  Alex Howard of the O’Reilly Radar writes about Gov 2.0 going local and mentions maverick cities such as  New York, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Ore. and the District of Columbia as being front and center in this movement.  Mitch Weiss, Boston’s Mayor Chief of Staff, spoke at the Kennedy School in September about the “New Urban Mechanics.”  The City of Boston is using smartphone apps to encourage civic participation.  Constituents report potholes, broken street lights and other city service complaints on their smart phone and receive a response back from the City ones the repair is made.  New Urban Mechanics compliments the old way of doing business, said Weiss, it doesn’t replace it.   It’s not surprising that local government seems to be having more success in e-government than the federal government.  Although the Obama Administration has promised transparency and has worked towards that endeavor, it hasn’t been an easy task.  The federal government is a huge bureaucracy with an ingrained culture that dislikes transparency.  If a U.S. Senator can put a secret hold on a bill and remain anonymous to the public, then the feds have a long way ahead before e-government is running full force and is completely transparent.