Web 2.0- Participation or Hegemony?

Web 2.0- Participation or Hegemony?

• Web 2.0 is a medium that allows audiences to become producers of media texts

• Blogs allow audiences can use to produce, and share, their own work.

• We no longer have to rely upon professional organisations to act as gatekeepers.

• 'dumbing down' of audiences

The Political: Ian Tomlinson

• One of the best examples of the 'political' impact of amateur video posted on the web was the death of Ian Tomlinson 

• The reality is that Twitter is an information-distribution network, not that different from the telephone or email or text messaging, except that it is real-time and massively distributed

• The internet has given the people a potentially powerful tool to communicate with each other, and so to challenge their rulers

• In their research into YouTube, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green (2009) found that 42% of the sample they analysed comprised of extracts from ‘traditional media’; and most of those had been uploaded by ‘users’

•  the clips were uploaded by fans rather than the traditional media companies themselves.

• Tube allows users to create their own ‘channels’

• What appears to be happening is that YouTube is now used more frequently as a commercial network for promotional and catch-up purposes

Co-opting the amateur

• Youtubers may create entertaining forms of media but they wouldn't be given the same status as celebrities created by traditional media

THE TRIVIAL: ZOO VISITS AND LAUGHING BABIES

Graeme Turner (2004) argues:

Even when ordinary people become celebrities through their own creative efforts, there is no necessary transfer of media power: they remain within the system of celebrity native to, and controlled by, the mass media. (Burgess and Green 2009: 23)

  Who’s got the power?

•  The audience – no longer have to rely upon the token ‘access’ traditional media offered us, such as newspapers
• Audiences can now easily produce texts themselves