David Buckingham, Professor of Media and Communications at Loughborough University, considers some of the revolutionary claims made for participatory media and 2.0, and makes a case for cautious optimism rather than whole-hearted celebration.
- In the last ten years, we have moved into a new age of participatory media.
- The world of Big Media – in which the media were owned and controlled by large commercial corporations – is no more.
- 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 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
- while online sharing sites like YouTube allow people to distribute their own media content to global audiences
- All these services appear to be free and open and these things are leading in turn to fundamental shifts in the operations of ‘old’ media like television, newspapers and even books: there is much talk of ‘user-generated content’, ‘citizen journalism’ and the empowerment of consumers.
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.
- Tim Berners-Lee, widely identified as the inventor of the World Wide Web, has argued that the basic technological infrastructure (structures) and many of the forms of Web 2.0 have been around since the beginning of the internet.
- There’s a long history of utopian fantasies about new media and technology.
- 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’
- the ultimate effects of these new technologies were much less revolutionary and much more complicated
- the idea that technology will bring about revolutionary social change, in and of itself.
- their impact is always dependent on how they are used, by whom, and for what purposes
2. Who’s participating?
- those produced by the Pew Foundation in the United States – produce very high estimates of the numbers of young people who ‘share content’ online
- the market research agency Hitwise – suggest that the number of active participants is very low: less than 0.5% of YouTube users, for example, actually upload material, and very little of that material is originally produced, rather than pirated clips from commercial media
- While there are some gender differences – young women are leading the way in areas like blogging, while young men tend to dominate video-sharing
- most remarkable differences are in terms of social class
- Digital divides’ are still apparent here, therefore – and they largely coincide with other differences.
- 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.
- older people are now the fastest-growing group of subscribers; the micro-blogging service Twitter is largely dominated by middle-aged people; Young people are sometimes the ‘early adopters’
3. What are they doing?
- it’s often assumed that participation is necessarily a Good Thing in itself
- a real problem in defining what counts as participation, or as ‘creating content’.
- There’s a big difference between posting an occasional comment on an online forum or a social networking profile, and filming, editing and posting a video
- although in surveys all these things tend to be seen as evidence of high levels of participation. In fact, only a very small proportion of users are generating original content: most are simply ‘consuming’ it as they always have done.
- This is not to say that it is trivial or worthless: on the contrary, home video (like the family photo album) can play a very important role in terms of memory and family relationships.
- However, 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.
4. 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.
- The two richest and most profitable global media corporations are now Google and Facebook.
- 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
- Many well-known services have struggled to find ways of ‘monetising’ what they do
- the internet is an exceptionally efficient medium for niche marketing and for targeting individual consumers.
- ‘cookies’ that are planted on the hard drive of our computers. This information is used to ensure that advertising and marketing are targeted only at those people who are most likely to be interested in it
- through a practice known as ‘data mining’, the data can be aggregated and then sold on to other companies.
5. Who’s doing the work?
- Much of this marketing is itself ‘user-generated’ and ‘interactive’
- Other companies (such as the mobile phone provider Orange) have picked up on the idea of ‘user-generated content’ by running competitions for consumers to create videos to promote their products.
- This results in what the media critic Soren Peterson has called ‘loser-generated content’
- What they produce effectively becomes proprietary information, owned by the company: Mark Zuckerberg owns the copyright of all the content posted on Facebook, and can do what he likes with it.
- Some argue that fan websites are about consumers taking back control of the media, making their own meanings from existing media texts, and leading towards a more democratic media environment
6. Will Media 2.0 save democracy?
- does this amount to a democratic revolution in communications? Is it really liberating or empowering ordinary people to take control of the media?
- 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
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