If you live outside of Japan and/or have never been here, I guess the chances are you’ve probably never heard of 2channel. (Or maybe you have. I don’t get away from Japan more than once or twice a year any more, so I can’t really claim to know.) Anyway, if you haven’t heard of it, do yourself a favor and head over to the Wikipedia site to read the 2channel article there. That article begins with the following:

2channel (2ちゃんねる, pronounced “ni-channeru”, 2ch for short) is the largest Internet forum in the world. With over 10 million visitors every day (as of 2001), it is gaining significant influence in Japanese society, approaching that of traditional mass media such as TV, radio and magazines.

As impressive as that may sound, I think it understates the influence that 2channel has had in Japan. Read a little further down in that article, and you will find this:

What is unique about this website is its scale and its management style. It has more than 600 active boards (Japanese ita) such as “Social News”, “Computers” and “Cooking”, making it the most comprehensive forum in Japan. Each board usually has thousands of specific threads, such as “Coming election in Tokyo: 4th vote”, “P4 vs. Athlon: overheating 51 times”, and “Best wheat for making Pizza: 3rd slice”.

And as far as the 2channel “management style”, well, there is none. At all. It is basically one big information free-for-all. And a completely anonymous one, at that. Because another feature that has set 2channel apart is that all posting there is done
anonymously.

Anyway, I am far from an expert on 2channel. But from what I know and have seen of it, I know that it is in part a resource where people go to ask questions and get some (hopefully) expert advice — even on the most obscure topics. People also rely on 2channel as a real-time source for breaking news and for discussion about breaking news.Yeah, some of it is just hearsay, but there are also firsthand reports, including reports from people who otherwise would not be sharing information unless they could do share it anonymously.

Now, as you would probably expect, users at 2channel can and do sometimes post bogus information. Sometimes they do it just for fun, sometimes for more sinister reasons. Given all that, the natural question to ask is: How do you know whom and what to trust there?

The answer to the “How do you know whom and what to trust at 2channel?” question is: You don’t. And the people (the smart ones at least) who use it as a source of information know that they can’t trust everything they read there. So they’re forced to fall back on the same resource that most smart people have learned from experience to rely on: Their own critical thinking skills.

I guess that experienced 2channelers end up acquiring a point of view that they need to take anything they read there “with a grain of salt”, and not just completely trust it. I personally think that’s a point of view that people should take when judging any media, anywhere.

Do you trust the New York Times?

Consider how easily the New York Times allowed itself, through one of its “star” reporters, Judith “Weapons of Mass Destruction” Miller, to be abused as a pre-war proganda tool for the invasion of Iraq. Or consider the fact that much more recently, the same newspaper agreed (at the request of someone in that same junta which they now fully know was responsible for feeding them all the WMD propaganda for the Judith Miller pieces that they have since retracted) to suppress for more than one year the news that Bush had unilaterally given an executive OK to the US National Security Council for a program to spy on private communications among US citizens within the US — in clear violation of existing US law and without any judicial oversight of any kind, including no oversight by that very courts that exist for reviewing these things in total secrecy.

So we have on one hand 2channel, which almost by its very design is not meant to be completely trusted. And on the other hand, we have traditional journalism, which asks you to trust it, but as we have seen, sometimes (perhaps often) betrays that trust.

Is “citizen journalism” a joke?

Which leads me to a posting by Dave! that I came across at Metblogs Chicago. It’s titled Chi-Cry-Me-A-Reader and is a response to a recent article in the Chicago Reader, written by one Michael Lenehan and titled “A Year Without Journalism: Let

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