Article(Notes)

Participation Debates – The media and democracy

• Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible people have an equal say in decision-making.
• The digital revolution and Web 2.0 have given users (i.e. us – because we are no longer just audiences) the opportunity to communicate ideas globally through the use of social networking.
• The uprisings in Egypt and Libya couldn’t have happened without the use of Twitter and Face book, with young people using social media to bypass the old regimes and organise demonstrations.
• Instead of waiting for the story to be edited and mediated by news organisations with their own ideological motives, we had access to a huge range of points of view, direct and unmediated (Michael Jackson).
• Blogging is another way that the media are becoming more democratic.
• The iconic video footage of the attack on the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001; the first hand reports from the Iran uprising – increasingly we are reporting and recording the news (citizen journalism and UGC).
• Citizen journalism can provide eyewitness accounts and subjective angles on stories to complement the work of professional news organisations.
• We do seem to have entered a new age when audiences are producers and the traditional power structures are being forced to listen.

In the Age of Media Six Questions about Media and Participation

• In the age of Media 2.0, ordinary people are no longer mere consumers of media, but also producers.
• The term ‘Web 2.0’ seems to have been coined by the digital marketing entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly back in 2001.
• There’s a danger of a kind of technological determinism here – the idea that technology will bring about revolutionary social change, in and of itself.
• “Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media élite… now it’s the people who are taking control.” – Rupert Murdoch (2006)
• The two richest and most profitable global media corporations are now Google and Facebook.
• Many well-known services – not least Twitter and Facebook – have struggled to find ways of ‘monetising’ what they do.
• Much of this marketing is itself ‘user-generated’ and ‘interactive’.