Media Magazine: In the Age of Media - six questions about media and participation

Main parts of article: 

• The world of Big Media - in which the media were owned and controlled by large commercial corporations - is no more. In the age of Media 2.0, ordinary people are no longer mere consumers of media, but also producers.
• Thus, blogs and online forums provide opportunities for ordinary people to have their say, and to speak back to those in power; wikis enable us to to collaborate and share knowledge in ways that challenge elites and experts; on social networking sites, we represent ourselves and connect with other people in new ways; while online sharing sites like YouTube allow people to distribute their own media content to global audiences. 

1. What's new? 

• The term 'Web 2.0' seems to have been coined by the digital marketing entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly back in 2001.  
• The kinds of claims that are being made about the liberating possibilities of social media echo those that were made in earlier times about the impact of cable TV, portable video, radio and even the printing press. All these things were apparently going to bring 'power to the people' - to undermine the power of political elites and big corporations, create new forms of collaboration, and allow ordinary people to express themselves and have their voices heard. 
• In terms of media theory, there's a danger of a kind of technological determinism here - the idea that technology will bring about revolutionary social change, in and of itself. 

2. Who's participating?

• While there are some gender differences - young women are leading the way in areas like blogging, while young men tend to dominate video-sharing - the most remarkable differences are in terms of social class. 
• At least in the US, it is young people from high-income families who are most likely to be posting or sharing online. While people in disadvantaged communities do increasingly have computers at home, they are less likely to have the multimedia capabilities and bandwidth that are needed for more sophisticated content creation and sharing. 
• Young people from wealthy, middle-class families are also more likely to have books at home, to use the educational dimensions of the internet and to participate in creative or arts-related activities offline. To a large extent, the most active participants in the creative world of Media 2.0 are the 'usual suspects' - people who are already privileged in other areas of their lives. 
• The same is true of mobile communications; while the micro-blogging service Twitter is largely dominated by middle-aged people. Young people are sometimes the 'early adopters', but the idea that  they are uniquely 'digital generation' - and that there is a kind of technological generation gap - is rapidly becoming outdated. 

3. What are they doing? 

• In fact, only a very small proportion of users are generating original content: most are simply 'consuming' it as they always have done. 
• However, people rarely see it as having anything to do with what they watch in mainstream media - let alone as a challenge to the power of Big Media. 

4. Who's making money? 

• View on Media 2.0; "Technology is shifting power away from the editors, the publishers, the establishment, the media elite ... now it's the people who are taking control." - Rupert Murdoch (in an interview in 2006); and it should alert us to the fact that there are large commercial interests at stake in these developments. 
• The richest and most profitable global media corporations are now Google and Facebook. Both are increasingly diversifying from their initial business - as a search engine and a social networking site - into a whole range of other media and branded products and services. Indeed, the apparent explosion 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. 
• For example, YouTube (now owned by Google) took five years from its launch before it finally came into profit, despite being the second most frequently visited site online. 
• Even so, it's clear that the internet is an exceptionally efficient medium for niche marketing and for targeting individual consumers. 

5. Who's doing the work?

• Much of this marketing is itself 'user generated' and 'interactive'. This is most obvious in the case of viral marketing, where consumers are effectively recruited to distribute commercial messages on behalf of companies. 
• There have been some instances where copyright owners - like 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, video mashups, and so on. Yet one could argue that, in the end, these fans are just promoting the brand - they may be using Harry Potter to express their own ideas, but they are doing so in a way that contributes to the success and the continuing profitability of the big companies. 

6. Will Media 2.0 save democracy?

• Despite the claims of some of the enthusiasts, digital media are not likely to result in a society of creative media producers, any more than the printing press resulted in a society of published authors. 
• Just 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.