Learning Objectives:

• Revise the media theories we are already familiar with.

• Understand ‘The Long Tail’.

• Consider how to use media theory in an exam answer.

Tim O’Reilly and Web 2.0

• The term Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2004) is associated with web applications that facilitate interactive systemic biases, interoperability, user-centered design, and developing the World Wide Web.

• A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other – dialogue, user-generated content and virtual community, in contrast to passively viewing content.

• Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups.

Dan Gillmor and ‘We Media’

• For years ‘Big Media’ (corporations such as Sky, Google and the BBC) have had control over who produces and shares media, and the information that people get. The people who own these large corporations are not representative of the diversity of society.

• The internet has allowed for the freedom of citizen journalism.

• The audience is now the producer.

Neil Henry and ‘American Carnival’

• Technology has caused a crisis in professional journalism.

• Citizen journalism is prone to unethical practises.

• Ethical professional journalism is essential to an informed, free and democratic society.

Charles Leadbeater and ‘We-Think’

• The way we think and make sense of ‘knowledge’ is fundamentally shifting in the online age.

• Open-access knowledge building communities on the web allow ideas to be shared and tested more quickly and effectively.

• More creativity and innovation, separate from institutional constraints.

Henry Jenkins and Convergence Culture• Convergence - the flow of content across

multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who would go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they wanted. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes

• Participatory culture - circulation of media content depends heavily on the active participation of the consumer.

• Collective intelligence – combining skills and resources (just like We-Think), which is enabled by convergence.

John McMuria and Youtube

• A participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture.

• Minorities are grossly under-represented - the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube tend to come from white middle class males.

• If we want to see a more "democratic" culture, we need to explore what mechanisms might encouraged greater diversity in who participates, whose work gets seen, and what gets valued within the new participatory culture.

Chris Anderson and ‘The Long Tail’

• The internet has transformed economics, commerce and consumption.

• As broadband internet allows more people to look for and share or buy a wider variety of material and products, what happens is that people buy less of more. Niche is no longer an expensive luxury.

• “The theory of the Long Tail can be boiled down to this: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”