IN THE AGE OF MEDIA 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