The social networks, the future of the mass medias

I have recently assisted the Third Digital Journalism Congress, event which was held in the Bizkaia Aretoa building in Bilbao, during the days 9, 10 and 11 of November. The main subject of the conference was the way the digital journalism is affecting our lives, and how the social networks are enhancing this effect. Several professionals from different nationalities came to Bilbao in order to share their knowledge about these changes with the attendees. Many were the susbjects connected to the journalism of this new era, and many the ways we, the journalists, could use these new ideas to improve the quality of our work. However and despite the amazing speeches of the speakers, it would be pretty hard to reflect all the information they gave us, so having that in mind, i will speak about the most interesting interventions of the three days.

Álvaro Peláez Avezuela, who works for the Fundeu, was the first speaker of the conference who dealt about the “New language born in the net: new education model and new enviroment”. It was nice to have someone of his age due to the reality the medias and us are exposed to. This fact made of his explanations a great proposal for solving some of the problems the medias are diving in nowadays . His speech highlighted the need of a clear and correct language by us on the net whislt we use some abreviations which are not considered correct by the RAE currently. This would lead us to write information of high quality and at the same it would be possible for us to save space in messages like the ones we use in twitter. In order to achieve this goal it would be neccessary to use our fonetical language combined with signs which represent different ideas or emotions like the ones which are being used on the internet by the bloggers or people who write on the forums.

The next day and after some absorbing ideas exposed by the first speakers it came Linda Castañeda’s turn, Professor of the University of Murcia. She exposed us her investigation called “The marble tower: the impact of the social networks on the university education model”. The concept besides the marble tower is the current university education system, which is an isolated terrain banished from the rest of the world. What professor Linda meant by this somehow poetical figure was that the university is a privileged knowledge source to which not all the people have access. In this place the students are able to develop their proficiency in different matters and become wiser, which leads to an unfair context for the rest of the people. Internet changed it all. With the appearance of the social networks some universities have

started to open their education programs to the open world with tools such as “moodle” or “ekasi” allowing people with no university formation to have access to that information. This fact has already started to change the idea of the marble tower into a tower made of mirrors which isntead of keeping the wisdom for itself reflects it to the world.

The intervention that closed the day was lead by the cooker Fernando Canales, owner of the “Estrella Michelín” award. He was not exactly the kind of person we would have expected to see in an event of this type, nonetheless, he was the only one who spoke to us in a friendly and spontaneous way, making of the last speech a relieving story. He basically told us about his first steps into the culinarian worl in the basque country, untill he realized that the basque culture

was closed to the new trends he was trying to bring to it. Thus he started a TV show where he worked for five years with the sole purpose of catching the eye of the basque people. He worked tirelessly untill he run out of ideas, this made him come up with the idea of using the social networks and the internet to get a new source of inspiration that could bring some changes to his work. He finally came to know his current assistant Iñigo, who taught him about the secrets of the new technologies. After absorbing all the information he gathered from the internet and his trips to New York, Fernando came back to Bilbao, where he started his business know as “Etxanobe”. Etxanobe is therestaurant where he deals with his customers using Ipads which enable them to choose the dishes they prefer, whilst they are able to share their opinions with their friends using the tools the Ipad offers them.

With the experiences the speakers shared with us we all realized about the importance the new technologies and the social networks have these days. They offer us the oportunity to create high quality content with the advantage of doing so from any place in the world in a fast way and without the need of too many tools. Having this in mind we should not understimate the chance that has been given to us.