WE Media Conference
Thursday, May 4th, 2006I started this blog because all the information on the internet about Hepatitis C was medical or research or textbook information. Other than a few cobwebsites in the US (mainly) with some short stories I couldn’t find anything about what it’s like to live with HepC and go through the combination therapy treatment.
Once I started a weblog conversations began with other people living with HepC and soon a small community of bloggers started. Then people began to have conversation with each other and I realised we needed a Forum – a place to talk, and to connect with others going through similar experiences. That community has grown and people feel empowered, and supported, by their contact and connection with other people. That’s “using the Internet as a collective force of unprecedented power” according to the ideas of the organisers of the Conference I was asked to participate in yesterday
That citizen groups like ours can threaten and challenge the media establishment was the hypothesis behind introducing a group of various net citizens into groups of international media executives attending this conference. CEO’s, presidents, VP’s from international newspaper groups, Al-Jazeera, BBC, Global Broadcasting Company, CNN, Wikipedia, and on and on. The great and the good of the media world.
So I briefly talked from the Conference floor about the online HepC community and “had a conversation” with a small group of media executives about the blogging community being a threat to their traditional news reporting profession and that they hopefully in time will find ways to work collaboratively with citizen reporting.
An interesting day but I did come away feeling the conversation was all one way…
More about the WE Media Conference on their site.
