The
political: Ian Tomlinson
·
Amateur video posted on the web was the death of Ian Tomlinson, who died
after being hit by a policeman during the 2009 G20 summit protests in London.
·
A New York lawyer sent a video he hadd made of the incident to The
Guardianàthis showed that the police version of events was not true.
·
User-generated video of the event was made available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HECMVdl-9SQ).
·
This emphasises how audiences can more readily challenge the official
version of events.
·
The policeman Simon Harwood, seen on video attacking Tomlinson, is to be
tried for manslaughter next year; without the ‘Web 2.0’ intervention it is
unlikely that the case would ever have gone to court.
·
Technology empowers the people, who, oppressed by years of authoritarian
rule, will inevitably rebel, mobilizing themselves through text messages,
Facebook, Twitter…
Morozov 2011: xiv
Morozov 2011: xiv
·
Morozov explains how countries like China and Iran have successfully
controlled the general population’s access to the internet, and so have
prevented the free circulation of information. However it has also been argued
that social networking sites have facilitated the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings as
they enabled protestors to bypass the centralised state media.
·
Politically, then, the internet has given the people a potentially
powerful tool to communicate with each other, and so to challenge their rulers.
·
However, as governments can exert a large degree of control over the
internet, ‘We Media’ on its own is not sufficiently strong to allow ‘people
power’ to succeed.
·
The internet has caused official control to loosen, it hasn’t removed
it.
The trivial: zoo visits and
laughing babies
·
In their
research into YouTube, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green (2009) found that 42% of
the clips they analysed were uploaded by fans rather than the traditional media
companies themselves.
·
Last two
years this percentage will have increased, as YouTube has become a medium of
‘catch up’ distribution in the UK, for Channels 4 and 5.
·
Burgess and
Green conclude that there are two YouTubes; they argue it is ‘a space where
these two categories [traditional media and home video] co-exist and collide,
but do not really converge’ (41).
·
Even as we
become used to watching television programmes on computers, mobile phones or
music players, we still experience it as television.
Co-opting the amateur
·
YouTube has
allowed ‘ordinary’ people to become celebrities, such as ‘Charlie is so cool
like!!!’ (http://www.youtube.com/user/charlieissocoollike?blend=1&ob=4),
they do not have the same status as celebrities created by traditional media.
Graeme Turner (2004) argues...
·
Even when
ordinary people become celebrities through their own creative efforts, there is
no necessary transfer of media power: they remain within the system of
celebrity native to, and controlled by, the mass media. (Burgess and Green
2009: 23)
·
Hence
without the help of traditional media Charlie McDonnell cannot exercise
‘celebrity power’; he is defined as a celebrity in the terms of traditional
media only.
·
The internet
does offer a diversity of viewpoints, both ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, it is
much more difficult for establishment discourses to structure how meaning is
created, and so it is less hegemonic (Driscoll and Gregg, 2008).
Who’s got the power?
·
Has Web 2.0
switched power from producers to the audience? No, but the balance has shifted.
·
Today we can
easily produce texts ourselves, even if we seem to be more interested in
mimicking traditional media by becoming YouTube celebrities, or watching music
videos and/or television programmes by favourite artists.
·
However it
is still early days in the development of user-generated content.
·
Over the
next few years, net-based audience-produced texts may start having a more
distinctive impact upon the internet.
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