Today, nearly everyone has the means to report what is going on in the world around them. Even the most basic phone has a camera, and it is simple to post images or capture a video and upload it onto the Internet.

This means that across the world millions of citizen journalists are able to do something that used to be exclusive to professional journalists, namely: to put new content into the public domain; to capture some part of the world and enter what has been captured into the wider world where others can see or hear it.

Consequently citizen journalists are just ordinary people doing the job of reporters. They are not under as many obligations as professional reporters; rather than objectivity or impartiality, their ‘gold standard’ is more likely to be freedom of expression. But this does not mean there is no value in what they have seen and heard and captured. Accordingly, as there is value in such material, so those who provide it should receive payment for it.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not talking about offering payment to some teenager who is blogging (and ranting) away in their bedroom. I’m referring to citizen journalists all around the world who have uploaded on-the-spot audio, video and information before their professional counterparts have even made it out of the hotel.

Global news platforms are increasingly reliant on this kind of user-generated content, but unless the user-generator is unusually canny, for the most part they receive no payment whatsoever.

To my mind, the way this level of short-changing has become standard industry practice, is nothing short of a travesty. Often the story would simply not get out if not for citizen journalists. So why should the international new business get out of paying them for their results (often achieved at considerable risk to themselves)?

For Example, during the Arab Spring, professional journalists were banned or censored by regimes and other powerful individuals who did not want certain stories to be reported. So citizen journalists with mobile phones were almost the sole source of first-hand information. Without citizen reporters, it would have been impossible to create a revolution. Through social media Tunisians encouraged the Egyptians and the Libyans to unite against dictatorship and oppression. Much of this was then fed into the traditional media, with international TV news and national newspapers running stories based on reports filed by citizen journalists.

Without these reporters there would have been next to no first-hand information transmitted to the outside world. So surely it is not beyond the best minds of the international news business to find a way of paying such citizens for the content they provided.

We hear so much about journalism needing a new business model. Perhaps citizens across the world would be more inclined to pay for the journalism they consume, if they thought they might be paid for the journalism they themselves produce.

Social media offer us escapism, an opportunity to escape physical reality and instead live in the digital world; a world of endless bragging and showing-off. Yet social media did not create the desire in us to be seen and heard. That desire has always been present, and now, with the advent of social media, there is further fuel for it. As one critic suggests, our already-narcissistic generation has been given ‘a platform through which we can inflate our egos even more’ (McAuliffe; 2014). And this, in turn, has intensified our need for validation.

In some ways, we are liberated but in other ways we are disempowered: we feel important or valued only when our looks are complimented or given the online seal of approval. And if the need for validation has always existed, the need for constant validation from an infinite number of strangers is surely unprecedented.

The funny thing is that most people are not the same on social media as they are in the rest of their lives. Our social media personas are always more illustrious and famous than their ‘real life’ counterparts. With social media we are able to present the best sides of ourselves, through the content we tweet or the pictures we post. We use filters to edit out our imperfections (or to accentuate the parts of us we do like); and we can’t do that so readily in reality.

To be honest, I’m a social media addict myself. I just can’t live without Instagram and Snapchat. I can press that one button and magically my pics are uploaded for the world to see. Not only have I gotten myself obsessed with the selfie culture but I also like to exhibit my latest gadgets, my new iPhone or my new Dr Dre beats. Materialism has never so easily celebrated as it is now.

Its saddens me to think that people might be losing the capacity for direct interaction. It is possible that we are slowly becoming more isolated and lonely as a result of this virtual world which we just can’t get enough of.

Perhaps we should do more to remind ourselves that vanity is only OK up to a certain point – a point which many of us may already have exceeded.