Citizen Journalism and me.

I recently learned that the comments that I leave on other people's blogs, stories published in the main stream media, or any comment I leave on any Internet website is classified as a form of citizen Journalism.

When I learned that I said to myself holy cow I'm and have been a citizen journalist all along and I don't even know about it.

And this comes at a time when I started thinking seriously about being part of citizen journalism group like Amman Net, 7iber, or any other alternative journalistic Jordanian group that I find suitable to my way of thinking.

In this case I feel that I'm absolved of this responsibility and don't have to join any group and all I need to do is continue doing what I have always been doing and that is leaving comments here and there and every where on the Internet and on main stream printed press.

You know the number of comments that I authored over the past twelve years or so, I can't even begin to estimate it, it could be any where from ten to fifteen thousand.

Grant you, some are as short as twenty five to thirty words but some is longer than one thousand words.

I have no way of knowing how many people read those comments or what on earth do they get out of it if anything, but I did receive responses from very interesting people over the years including major US publications, mind you, not offering me an opportunity to become a citizen journalist in their outfits or anything like that.

They were merely supportive, passive, or strongly opposed to the view point that I have presented at the time.

In a way I can appreciate their concerns because those who have known me for a long period of time probably realized that over the years or as I aged I started moving back from the center of the left to the center of the right.

I'm not entirely sure what caused that shift but most likely it is the kind of people that I associate myself with them and the type of material that I read have something to do with it.

I'm not sorry about that and I see myself as someone that is evolving all the time in a dynamic way. I can't under any circumstances adhere to one school of thought, an ideology of some kind of a dogma.

I consider myself as someone that calls the shots as he sees it, yes, I do exercise self sensorship, but that is only in reference to staying out of scandalous things, slanderous issues, and so on, but I don't feel that I exercise self sensor-ship regarding my fundamental rights to freedom of speech or freedom of expression.

So yeah I'm writing today to welcome myself into the world of citizen journalism and to congratulate myself on the ten to fifteen thousand comments that I have written.

Who knows may be some how some where somebody may have read one or more of these comments and benefited out of it.

I really don't know that and don't even care to know since when I do comment on something I do it because this is what I love to do, I enjoy it tremendously and appreciate having the opportunity to express my view unhindered, unfettered, in its entirety, without an editor scissors slashing some of it out.

The burden is entirely my own, and the consequences are my own as well. Whether I make somebody happy, I make a fool out of myself, or write something reprehensible, it is all my choice and it is all part of this citizen journalism that I have chosen to be part of it at the dawn of this twenty first century.

So from here in on if I'm going to be biased it will be biases toward citizen Journalism, the information is totally unfiltered, unslanted, free of partisanship.