New Rules

Alex MacLeod
am892313@ohio.edu

Photo from Vedosoft.com

In a world where technology is continuously changing, industries change too.  Recently journalism has been an industry that has seen huge technological advantages combined with a changing digital landscape.

Reporters are now easily reporting alone, acting as their own camerapersons.  Droids and 360 cameras have revolutionized photography and how we report.

The digital world has caused the pure number of publications to sky-rocket, and for anyone to act as a reporter.  They have allowed consumers to get most of the media they need for free, causing reputable news outlets to use clickbait and misleading headlines to get the views that drive ad revenue.

Things are changing, and they are changing fast.

When someone like Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel of the National Press Photographer's Association, says that "we should not be creating new laws based solely on the fact that it involves a new technology."

This attitude is outdated and misguided.  With each new technology, laws should be upgraded and revised.  This is the attitude that has allowed the same laws that governed long rifles that took minutes to prepare one shot to govern assault rifles that can shoot hundreds of rounds in a single minute.

It's this attitude that has allowed online surveillance and tracking to go largely unrestricted for so long.

In an MIT Technology Review article, Vivek Wadhwa discusses that although interviewers can't ask someone about their religion, sexual preference or political views, they can filter interviewees out by looking at their Facebooks.

Wadhwa said "these regulatory gaps exist because laws have not kept up with advances in technology. The gaps are getting wider as technology advances more rapidly... the same is happening in every domain that technology touches."

While technology is advancing so rapidly, it is extremely difficult to create laws quickly enough to keep up, but entities need to at least try.  Even if laws aren't changing fast enough, the journalism industry should be quick to create ethical codes and guidelines.  Individuals should constantly be questioning the ethics of everything that they do, especially when it comes to new technology.

"We haven't come to grips with what is ethical, let alone with what the laws should be, in relation to technologies such as social media," said Wadhwa.

That is why it is so vital that journalists be proactive.

Laws simply won't catch up in time.  According to a CNN article, Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor who tracks the intersection of law and technology, says that laws are generally at least 5 years behind technology as it is developing.

There is a constant shift happening before our eyes, and those who hold views similar to Osterreicher need to consider how changes in technology are in fact a key reason that laws must be changed.