In the age of media 2.0 - six questions about media and participation

· 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