Take your pick of any of the major events of 2014 and you would be hard-pressed to choose one that did not involve citizen journalism. This past year, ordinary individuals often equipped with nothing more than cell phone cameras reported on and at times changed the course of national and international affairs. From the streets of Ferguson came footage of billowing tear gas and heavily militarized riot police; from Crimea, reports of troops bearing Russian equipment and uniforms sans insignia. In the case of Eric Garner’s death, it was the act of citizen journalism itself – the recording of the illegal chokehold by a bystander – that turned what would otherwise have been yet another tragic killing into a flashpoint for national outrage.

But citizen journalism in the digital age consists of more than the creation of content by non-professional sources. It is the generation, but also aggregation, proliferation, and editing of material by ordinary citizens, often to increase the visibility of what might not – or for political reasons, cannot – be covered by traditional media outlets. The sheer quantity of content that is uploaded onto the Internet every day is phenomenal and has made the attention of users a commodity even more coveted than before. In addition to playing the role of reporters, the citizen journalist must also add the positions of editor, marketer, and due to the temporal persistence and ease of retrieval of information, curator to their civic roles. In a media ecosystem where the propagation of information is just as important as the initial content, these latter titles are the ones most commonly adopted by the average netizen. Every upvote on Reddit, every like and share on Facebook is a small yet crucial act of citizen journalism that when summated, results in the spread of national dialogue. And if you were to peruse my Facebook wall, you would find, among everyday banalities, a static and carefully pruned selection of articles which offer great insight on social issues, many of which came to my attention after being shared by friends.

Much of netizen journalism is therefore reporting on reporting, or rather, the facilitation of the spread of existing information, and a prime example of this would be chinaSMACK. Its spectrum of coverage consists of anything from regional Chinese news events to national controversies to popular blog posts and reactions of Chinese netizens to world events. It is noteworthy that none of the content that it generates is original, save for the occasional article summary; the site is dedicated almost exclusively to English translations of Chinese articles and netizen comments. Its role is that of an indispensible middleman who collects and formats information so that it may bridge two separate social spheres. It mirrors what we all do when we share and promote articles with the intention of making our friends better informed.

The obvious downside to all of this, however, is the dreaded confinement in the echo chamber. If aggregators such as chinaSMACK are to be neutral parties, they must carefully choose to translate articles and comments from differing viewpoints. Similarly, if all my friends are of a certain political disposition, it’s awfully easy to only see articles that I would inherently agree with. Productive dialogue would thus be stifled. The diversity of the Internet provides certain checks to this – the opposing views are out there, if only we would seek them out. How to encourage people to do so remains the question.