Tuesday 4 December 2012

Participation Debates – The media and democracy

Morag Davis is a Lecturer in Film and Media at Nelson and Colne College.

So, what is ‘democracy’?

  • democracy is a form of government in which all eligible people have an equal say in decision-making.
  • ‘one person one vote’ to the modern media landscape
  • The great thing is when you start seeing it in places like China and Afghanistan. It’s democracy. We’ve kind of given democracy back to the world. - Simon Cowell
  • In the pre-digital era, there were very few ways in which audiences could make their voices heard.
  • the digital revolution and Web 2.0 have given users (i.e. us – because we are no longer just audiences) the opportunity to communicate ideas globally through the use of social networking.
  • in the countries now experiencing this ‘Arab Spring’, access to mobile technology and the internet is still limited to a relatively small elite, so perhaps we have not yet seen true democracy through the media.
  • If information is power, then the internet has empowered its users by giving them unparalleled instant and almost unmediated access to unfolding news stories from a variety of sources, bypassing the hegemonic institutions that control the dominant media discourses in society. 
  • Blogging is another way that the media are becoming more democratic. 
  • the iconic video footage of the attack on the Twin Towers on 11th September 2001; the first hand reports from the Iran uprising – increasingly we are reporting and recording the news.
  • citizen journalism can do is provide eyewitness accounts and subjective angles on stories to complement the work of professional news organisations

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