·
last ten years, we have moved into a new age of
participatory media
·
Web 2.0’ – has brought about a much broader media
revolution
·
The world of Big Media is no
more
·
ordinary people are no longer mere consumers of
media, but also producers
·
Vertical, top-down communication has given way to
horizontal, networked communication.
·
blogs and online forums provide opportunities for
ordinary people to have their say
·
wikis enable us to collaborate and share knowledge
in ways that challenge elites and experts
·
social networking sites, we can represent ourselves
and connect with other people in new ways
·
Youtube allows people to distribute their media
globally
·
Don’t depend on getting past editors or
gatekeepers
·
Can be accessed by anyone
anywhere
·
Reflects a desire for a fairer, more democratic and
creative society
WHAT’S NEW?
·
Web 2.0 coined by digital marketing entrepreneur;
Tim O Riley – 2001
·
An attempt to rebrand internet business after the
bursting of the .com bubble
·
Tim Berners –Lee – the basic technologic
infrastructure have been around since the beginning of the
internet.
·
Long history of utopian views about new media and
technology
o
Some say its
liberating
o
Will be “power to the
people”
·
Will undermine power of political elites and big
corporations
·
Will create now forms of
collaborations
·
Will allow ordinary people to express
themselves
= Ultimate effects of these new technologies were
much less revolutionary and more complicated
·
kind of technological determinism here - the idea
that technology will bring about revolutionary social
change
·
Yet technologies do not come from nowhere
o
created in response to wider social, economic and
cultural developments
·
impact is Dependent on how they are used, by who,
and for what purposes
WHO’S PARTICIPATING?
·
innovations are adopted in uneven and often unequal
ways
·
agency Hitwise – suggest that the number of active
participants is very low
o
less than 0.5% of YouTube users actually upload
material,
o
Very little of that material is originally
produced, rather than pirated clips from commercial
media.
·
striking social inequalities in participation
·
gender differences – young women are leading the
way in areas like blogging, while young men tend to dominate
video-sharing
·
Class differences
o
young people from high-income families who are most
likely to be posting or sharing online
o
people in disadvantaged communities do increasingly
have computers at home, they are less likely to have the multimedia
capabilities
·
‘Digital divides’ are still apparent
·
Young people from wealthy, middle-class families
are also more likely to have books at home to use the internet for education and
to participate in creative or arts-related activities
offline
·
The most active participants in the creative world
of Media 2.0 are the people who are already privileged in other areas of their
lives.
·
While younger people initially drove the uptake of
social networking sites; older people are now the fastest-growing group of
subscribers
·
Twitter is largely dominated by middle-aged
people.
·
Young people are usually the ‘early
adopters’
WHAT ARE THEY DOING?
·
often assumed that participation is necessarily a
Good Thing
o
But there is a real problem in defining what counts
as participation, or as ‘creating content’
·
A difference between posting a comment and editing
publishing and uploading a video
·
Only a very small proportion of users are
generating original content: most are simply ‘consuming’ it as they always have
done.
·
Enthusiasts for participatory tend to ignore
superficial practices of the majority of people
·
research on amateur video-making found that it
continues to be dominated by home movies of family life
o
kept as a record that people imagine will be
watched at some time in the future
o
rarely edited or
shared
·
People rarely see it as having anything to do with
what they watch in the mainstream media – let alone as a challenge to the power
of Big Media.
WHO’S MAKING MONEY?
·
“Technology
is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the
media élite… now it’s the people who are taking
control.”
o
radical
media activist from a 2006 interview with the notorious Rupert
Murdoch
·
Alerts
us; there are large commercial interests at stake in these
developments.
·
two
richest and most profitable global media corporations are now Google and
Facebook
o
Both
increasingly diversifying from their initial business
·
The
rise of democratic participation in the media could also be seen as a matter of
the growing concentration of power in the hands of a small number of global
companies.
·
very
uncertain business
o
YouTube
(now owned by Google) took five years from its launch before it finally came
into profit
·
MySpace,
have undergone a rapid rise and fall.
·
internet
is an exceptionally efficient medium for niche marketing and for targeting
individual consumers
·
detailed
information about our preferences and buying habits is being gathered
unknowingly through cookies
o
Specifically
targets certain people
WHO’S DOING THE WORK?
·
Much of this marketing is itself ‘user-generated’
and ‘interactive’
·
most obvious in the case of viral
marketing
o
consumers are recruited to distribute commercial
messages on behalf of companies
·
Orange has picked up on the idea of ‘user-generated
content’ by running competitions for consumers to create videos to promote their
products.
·
Soren Peterson - ‘loser-generated
content’
o
A great deal of unpaid labour goes into the
production of blogs
·
issue with fan
websites
o
celebrated by enthusiasts for Media
2.0
·
fan websites are about consumers taking back
control of the media
o
J.K. Rowling and Warner Brothers, who own the Harry
Potter franchise – have taken legal action against fans who have used and
reworked their materials in making fan fiction,
·
They may be active participants, but they are also
the ultimate consumers.
WILL MEDIA 2.0 SAVE DEMOCRACY?
·
it’s clear that we are in a period of significant
change
·
Is it really liberating or empowering ordinary
people to take control of the media?
·
reasons to doubt
this
o
digital media are not likely to result in a society
of creative media producers
o
like ‘old’ media, these new media are driven by
commercial imperatives – and that means that some people are bound to benefit
from these developments much more than others
o
There is democratic promise but it will require
more than technology alone
