'Anti-sociality'?

The MP3 player dominates the Western world - BBC

BBC News Magazine on 27 September posted an article entitled “Has the iPod made us anti-social?”, by Tom de Castella.

The story discusses whether iPods or MP3 players could make people isolated from their surroundings and society. I share the opinion of the Telegraph columnist Bryony Gordon, who writes that “young people have grown up to be ‘plugged in’ to their iPod, rather than relating to their surroundings”. This is not simply a lack of interaction with their surroundings but with the values nourished from relationships in communities.

Facebook me!

According to Nielsen’s report, American people spent the staggering amount of 53 billion minutes on Facebook in May this year, much more than any other site. 

With 150 million users, it means that each American user spent 350 minutes a month, or 10 minutes a day on Facebook.  However, this is much less than I expected.

“Living with 9/11”: Stories of healing the pain

Ground Zero. Source: AP

The Guardian this week has a series of “Living with 9/11” with many stories about people who have been suffering pain and loss from the terrorist attacks on 11 September ten years ago. Since the devastation of the World Trade Centre, the world has witnessed the broader war on terror, beginning with the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The war was marked by the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death this year. Leaders of state considered it as a great success of the war. 

Buddhist approach to journalistic responsibility

 by Minh Duc Luong

In the book The elements of journalism, Kovach and Rosenstiel clarify journalists’ obligation to the truth as the first and most ‘confusing’ principle in journalism. “[E]very one agrees journalists must tell the truth, yet people are befuddled about what ‘the truth’ means.” (2007, p. 36). Truth is the fundamental element for journalists to be responsible to society. There are many western philosophical approaches defining the concept of ‘truth’ which are relevant to the role of journalists in society; among them is Utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. These discussions of ‘truth’ result in an argument about the self of the journalist and as a result, leave equivocal conclusions about the way journalists should act in society. However, Buddhist philosophy has another approach to ‘truth’ with a methodology of behaviour that would be relevant to a discussion of the concept of journalistic responsibility. This essay thus first gives an overview of the utilitarian approach and argues the problems of this theory in explaining the responsibility of the journalist in society. Secondly, it examines the fundamental concept of the “Four Noble Truths” in Buddhist philosophy in an attempt to clarify the questions remaining unanswered regarding journalistic obligations. Case studies will be used for practical examples.