Civil Surveillance

The development of technology brought civil surveillance system. People can easily get connected on the Internet and concentrated on specific topic or person. This has positive and negative aspects.

In positive views, this structure enables citizens to monitor actions of the power including the government and major corporations. When misconducts occur, not just TV news and newspapers but each user of the Internet can make articles and share. More importantly there’s cases internet users share what mainstream media don’t cover. Especially countries like Japan where the investigative role of journalism is weak needs this role so that people can notice what’s going on behind the wall of reality. Notably, several investigative organisations of journalism appeared like Democracy Now! in the United States and The Korean Center for Investigative Journalism (KCIJ) in South Korea. In recent years, these more investigative media not sponsored by the major corporations play important roles in journalism as well .

From negative aspects, there’s tons of excessive condemnations and concentrations of attentions to certain topics and people. As an example, when celebrities or famous youtubers got flamed, people on the Internet all at once begin to search and visit websites with some information violating privacy. Then some of internet users tweet or post negative comments directly to the person or other websites. As time passes, the scale expands, but the problems are that the more it spreads, the less understood the essential of a topic is, and the existence of people just wanting to boo celebrities.

The emergence of the Internet, especially social media, allows us to get united quickly and share our opinions. It also has the fonction of monitoring reality. But there’s some questions of excessive amount of people just condemning and making the situations chaotic.