These distinctly different media share three common, interrelated characteristics: •
Many-to-many media now make it possible for every person connected to the network to broadcast and receive
text,
images,
audio,
video,
software,
data,
discussions,
transactions,
computations,
tags, or
links to and from every other person. The asymmetry between broadcaster and audience that was dictated by the structure of pre-digital technologies dictated has changed radically. This is a technical-structural characteristic. • Participatory media are
social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of
many people. This is a psychological and social characteristic. One example is
StumbleUpon. •
Social networks, when amplified by information and
communication networks, enable broader, faster, and lower cost coordination of activities. This is an economic and political characteristic. Full-fledged participatory news sites include
NowPublic,
OhmyNews, DigitalJournal.com,
On the Ground News Reports and
GroundReport. With participatory media, the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible. In the words of
David Sifry, the founder of
Technorati, a search engine for blogs, one-to-many "lectures" (i.e., from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as the audience". This changes the tone of public discussions. The mainstream media, says
David Weinberger, a blogger, author and fellow at
Harvard University's
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, "don't get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations". That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility. Some proposed that journalism can be more "
participatory" because the
World Wide Web has evolved from "read-only" to "
read-write". In other words, in the past only a small proportion of people had the means (in terms of time, money, and skills) to create content that could reach large audiences. Now the gap between the resources and skills needed to consume online content versus the means necessary to produce it have narrowed significantly to the point that nearly anyone with a web-connected device can create media. As
Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media declared in his 2004 book
We the Media, journalism is evolving from a lecture into a conversation. He also points out that new interactive forms of media have blurred the distinction between producers of news and their audience. In fact, some view the term "audience" to be obsolete in the new world of interactive participatory media. New York University professor and blogger
Jay Rosen refers to them as "the people formerly known as the audience." In "We Media", a treatise on participatory journalism, Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis suggest that the "audience" should be renamed "participants". Although 'participatory media' has been viewed uncritically by many writers, others, such as Daniel Palmer, have argued that media participation must also "be understood in relation to defining characteristics of contemporary capitalism – namely its user-focused, customised and individuated orientation." ==See also==