For more on John’s take on the world, check out his personal blog.

PBS’s Video Your Vote project recruited citizens to take video cameras to their polling places and upload the video of their voting experience to YouTube. PBS asked citizens to report on any problems with voting machines, access to polling places, voter intimidation, and registration, as well as interesting perspectives on the election and the voting process. What does this mean for the future of journalism in the age of digital media?

Obviously, there are a lot of questions on this subject and very few answers as we enter a period of relative anarchy in terms of journalism and media models. In one of our readings this week, Newspapers and Thinking The Unthinkable, Clay Shirky talks about the history of newspapers and printed media, and how the current model was not intentional and deliberate, but rather an experiment that turned out to be fortuitously effective for nigh on 500 years. I went to the Newseum recently, and my favorite exhibit was the one consisting of hundreds of years of newspapers and their predecessors along a long (long) hallway. It’s pretty cool to see the common narrative of society laid out like that, and it is a bit disappointing to think that there likely won’t be a similar sort of central channel of communication for the next 500 years.

On the other hand, the opportunities available to us now, at the cusp of this new media age, are exciting and innumerable. When every citizen is a journalist at some points in her or his life, the coverage of important news events will be more dynamic, compelling, textured, and told from a wider range of perspectives than when woven into one cohesive narrative by one writer or editor. All of the people on Video Your Vote got to tell pieces of their stories, and thereby gave us a story of their community. This part of the promise of the new media age is immensely appealing to me.

When news is curated by the establishment, so to speak, the danger is that it’s easy to represent a paucity of views, a small subset of the millions of perspectives that exist in the population as a whole. With the decentralization of the news, we can find out how all sorts of groups make sense of the world, unmediated by that establishment voice, which may have particular ways of interpreting their contributions that don’t reflect the group’s perspective in an authentic way.

This idea runs somewhat counter to the idea that the new journalism will require careful cultivation by a cadre of passionate news professionals. I get that editing, culling, and training is necessary to routinely generate high-quality journalism from amateurs, but I also think that an important aspect of the web is that there is no formal barrier to entry as in printed newspapers. Anyone can comment on On Faith on washingtonpost.com, even though very few letters to the editor will be printed in the non-digital paper in any given week. And the moments of web greatness are when comments or blog posts or YouTube videos go viral because they represent something important in the cultural zeitgeist, even if that contribution wasn’t recognized by a traditional professional editor or journalist.

I make no predictions about the specific future of journalism online, because many people (one of whom is my professor, Nicco Mele- whose website is definitely not dangerous, so ignore the year-old warning you may see) have written and spoken more and more intelligently on the subject than I, but I am intrigued and will watch with interest as it unfolds.

Why are journalists and not bloggers assumed to be ethical by the FTC? – Media Matters

How Mobile Phones Contribute To Female Progress In Developing Nations – Jezebel

Is Supporting Women And Girls Just Another Fad? – Jezebel
The challenge and opportunity of investing in women and girls has definitely hit its stride of late, and I hope it continues to receive the  attention it deserves.

Patient capital, markets that work and ending the endless emergency of poverty – Seth Godin

This seems to me a valuable and relevant service, and one that is likely to become more and more sought out as we decentralize the way we read the news.

Says Ms. Dowd:

According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.

A good friend sent me this article, “Blue is the New Black,” and asked me what I thought about its implications for happiness for both women and men. It’s worth a (critical) read. Dowd cites the General Social Survey and Arianna Huffington, who in turn cites the GSS and an abstract from two professors at the Wharton School- the abstract (pdf) has some useful graphs and charts starting on page 34.

The starting point of both pieces is that women’s happiness has been declining since about 1970, when the GSS started measuring these things, while men’s happiness has been increasing over that time. The conclusions include things like Dowd asking rhetorically, “Did the feminist revolution benefit men more than women?” and Huffington proclaiming that “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”

Apparently, all women are sad.

I don’t buy it, and here are two reasons: first, the articles don’t even mention the fact that most people (even those crazy people known as economists) agree that there’s no way to get people to be consistent about measuring happiness. I could have the exact same amount of happiness as someone else, but I might quantify it differently. Plus, women are constantly bombarded with ads and social messages telling us that we’re not happy, whereas ads for men are all: “you’re awesome! now be awesomer!,” which to me is a pretty good reason to suspect that women and men might describe their happiness differently in aggregate. Also, happiness and fulfillment are not the same thing, and it’s a huge leap from “less happy than before” and “more stressed than before” to “living an unfulfilled and empty life.”

Secondly, Dowd goes off on a tangent about how women take more medication for depression, and therefore must be sadder, while completely ignoring the fact that the social incentives for men and women to get treatment for mental health may be very different. So women may not be popping more pills because they’re sadder, but simply because it’s more acceptable for them to do so. If we’re gonna stereotype here, let’s just go ahead and say that it’s much more socially unacceptable for men to get help for mental health issues than for women, since mental illness still equates to weakness in many people’s minds.

I grant that Dowd might have a point with her idea that men are now less likely to have complete financial responsibility for the household and family, and that this might reduce stress for men. I celebrate this reduction in an unfair burden on men bringing home that good ol’ bacon. But I think the rest of her conclusions are significant extrapolations from the limited data.

As Anna North from Jezebel says, Enough With This Crap About Women’s Unhappiness.