Essay

The development of new/digital media means the audience is more powerful in terms of consumption and production. Discuss the argument for and against this view.

The development of new and digital media have empowered audiences through pluralism by social media however, it can be argued that they are also less empowered as the minority of media producers always serves a majority of consumers (Pareto's Law). The medium has been described as: "the most important medium of the twentieth century" (Briggs and Burke).

A Marxist perspective would argue that the so-called “information revolution” has done little to benefit audiences or to subvert the established power structures in society. Far from being a “great leveller” (Krotoski, 2012) as many have claimed, it has merely helped to reinforce the status quo by promoting dominant ideologies. The most popular news website in the UK by a considerable margin is the ‘Mail Online’, which receives more than 8 million hits every month and is continuing to expand rapidly – with forecasts that it will make £100 million or more in digital revenues in the next three years. Similar to its tabloid print edition, the website takes a Conservative, right-wing perspective on key issues around gender, sexuality and race and audiences appear to passively accept what the Marxist theorist, Gramsci, called a hegemonic view. When one of their chief columnists, Jan Moir, wrote a homophobic article about the death of Stephen Gately in 2009 there were Twitter and Facebook protests but, ultimately, they did not change the editorial direction of the gatekeepers controlling the newspaper.

Through the use of Social sites, pluralism is becoming more powerful as millions of people are being enabled to provide opinions through comment section and statuses showing evidence of a Pluralistic point of view and freedom of speech. This also allows deterioration of censorship as the audience is able to receive news that wouldn't be televised and that they are interested in.  The police brutality that has been recognised through UGC by citizen journalism using social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is an example of this. Rupert Murdoch stated, “People are taking charge of their own lives and they read what they want” this shows example of the uses and gratification theory stating that people are able to make conscious choices about the media they consume and can conform, accommodate or reject (Gurevitch).  UGC enables the audience to portray the truth that the media may try to manipulate for their political benefit an example of this is the Police riots that the BBC manipulated despite being a non-biased news organisation.

Pareto’s Law is evident in colonisation such as Google bringing $50 Billion revenue at the end quarter of 2012 whilst the audience/users of the media giant’s corporation bring in less than a small fraction providing that they are successful such as Zoella. People are becoming too reliant on the internet ad are being dumbed down by blogs written by unprofessional journalists that may have not complete sufficient research on the topic Andrew keen described it as, “web pages and blogs are like a million monkeys typing nonsense”. Articles such as ‘Listicles’ are another example of mediums that dumb down audiences, not only are do they not write proper articles but the majority of the content is unnecessary mindless entertainment providing list such as ‘top 10 things dog owners do’.

File sharing allows people to post and share files enabling them to start a venture providing a user equal chance to be an entrepreneur and possibly successful as Larry Page and Sergey Brin. By allowing these possibilities it shows that the internet creates a more democratized society especially in western culture as they can use the education they have received and make a name for them self or a company. Negroponte put it as, "Monolithic empires of mass media are dissolving in to array of cottage industries". Creating a paradigm shift (Krotoski) for the benefit of user. The: "Technological blossoming of the culture of freedom, individual innovation and entrepreurialism" (Castells 1996) is a definition of democratization in society by a citizen by being able to publicize them selves to the world using the internet and its pluralism medium such as social media. Democratization of society is a big part of new and digital media as it aided the revolution of the middle-east (Arab Spring) as leader such as Gaddafi were taking to from their reign by the unity of people through Facebook.

"Privacy may be an anomaly, now over" (Vint Cerf, Google) which has made the audience weak and vulnerable as data including personal information is being collected by government through search engines. The company stated, "US government's demands for user data have risen 250% since 2009", through the use of cookies and caches users searches are being collected and the data may corrupt the news laws being enforced as a result of this data as the it may not be correct. This also introduces the problem of a users security breach as info can be leaked by hackers creating an alert for the users safety. An example of a security breach is the iCloud hacking the exposed private content of celebrities by the release of their nudes, supporting hegemonic ideologies, as the majority of the images portrayed the images of female celebrities. Google alters its search engine results to benefit itself, When users search for videos on Google the links first shown in the results are YouTube links which is a institution the Google had bought to increase traffic, Which supports the view, "People in power control us" (Gramsci).

From a pluralistic point of view new and digital media is a weapon that can be use to battle against the elites and media giants for power and the use of freedom of speech not only allows the user to post comment but also provide services and product to another target audience. This empowers the audience by providing them with a way to challenge the gatekeepers. Prior to the establishment and revolution of the internet, people weren't able to challenge. People were fed information through news and were not able to choose. However, by reading personalised news through personal selection and algorithms used by social sites and hash tags people are able to read articles through social sites and educate themselves on the business/media industry.

In conclusion the audience is empowered in terms of production and self employment. However people have also become dumbed down due to the simplicity of the internet and the audiences attraction to easy thing which doesn't allow them to learn new vocabulary unlike traditional media which forces you to read and learn about news by professional journalists and as an audience have become, "puppets to cultural imperialism and capitalism",