WHAT IS DEMOCRACY?
·
A form of government in which all eligible people
have an equal say in decision making
·
System of government used in most countries in the
world except one-party states such as China, dictatorships such as Libya and
non-symbolic monarchies such as Saudi Arabia.
·
The X Factor as an example: in the 2010 series,
15,488,019 million votes were cast by viewers to decide the outcome of the
programme.
o
an example of media democracy at
work
·
Pre-digital era, there were very few ways in which
audiences could make their voices heard.
·
Digital revolution and Web 2.0 have given users the
opportunity to communicate ideas globally through the use of social
networking
o
Series Six, winner Joe McElderry was held off the
crucial Christmas No.1 spot in the British charts by ‘foul-mouthed rockers’ Rage
Against The Machine.
§
Half a million Facebook users joined an anti-X
Factor campaign to protest at the state of the modern music
industry
·
The uprisings in Egypt and Libya couldn’t have
happened without the use of Twitter and Facebook
·
It was probably the mobile phone and its evolution
into a convergent device that enabled these
uprisings
o
Could communicate on the move and keep one step
ahead of the authorities
·
in the countries now experiencing this ‘Arab
Spring’, access to mobile technology and the internet is still limited to a
relatively small elite
·
Not yet seen true democracy through the
media.
·
Internet has empowered its users by giving them
unparalleled instant and almost unmediated access to unfolding news stories
o
This had bypassed the hegemonic institutions that
control the dominant media discourses in society
·
Blogging is another way that the media are becoming
more democratic.
o
Blogs have as much access to global audiences as
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation
§
July 2011 the most popular blog was not FailBlog or
PerezHilton but The Huffington Post, a well-respected political blog with 54
million monthly readers.
·
Some of the most significant events of the last ten
years have been communicated by ordinary people who just happened to be in the
right place at the right time
o
For example the iconic video footage of the attack
of 9/11
·
Citizen journalism can do is provide eyewitness
accounts and subjective angles on stories to complement the work of professional
news organisations.
·
We have entered a new age when audiences are
producers and the traditional power structures are being forced to
listen.
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