We Media and Democracy

David Gauntlett: Web 2.0

• Tim Berners Lee invented the Internet with the vision that
people would be connected and creative
• “He imagined that browsing the Web would be a matter of
writing and editing, not just searching and reading” –
Gauntlett
• Web 2.0 invites users to play
• We are seeing a shift away from a ‘sit back and be told’
culture towards more of a ‘making and doing’ culture
 David Gauntlett: Web 2.0
• In the case of the media, there is
obviously the shift towards internet-
based interactivity
• At least 3/4 of UK population are
regular internet users
• More than 1/3 of people have a
Facebook account
• More and more people are writing
blogs, participating in online
discussions, sharing information,
music and photo, and uploading
video.
 Web 2.0
• Includes a social element where
users generate and distribute
content, often with freedom to
share and re-use
• Has resulted in an increasing
‘globalisation’
• The birth of a more ‘participatory
culture’
• Moving from a communication
model of ‘one-to-many’ to
‘many to many’ system
 Dan Gillmor: Citizen Journalists
• ‘Big media’ have enjoyed control over who gets
to produce and share media
• Effect on democracy
• Who owns these companies?
• Are we represented?
• Gillmor sees the Internet as a catalyst for a
challenge to this established hegemony
• Gillmor calls bloggers ‘the former audience’:
news blogs a new form of people’s journalism
 Citizen Journalism
• Theorist Mark Poster says the internet
provides a ‘Habermasian public sphere’ – a
cyberdemocratic network for communicating
information and points of view that will
eventually transform into public opinion.
Keith Bassett: Cyberspace Democracy

• “The public intellectual of

today must now be much
more alive to the
possibilities for
participating in what could
become a new ‘cyberspace
democracy’ – an expanded
public sphere which is less
academic and less elitist”
 New Media
• Increased interactivity of audiences
• Poststructuralist theory sees the audience as
active participators in the creation of
meaning
• In a postmodern world consumption is seen as
a positive and participatory act
• An increased ‘democratisation’?