Media on demand: partial participation

Enter: the Internet. It may have begun as a tool based on inter-continental ballistic missile research, and for the first 30 years of testing, it may have been a plaything of boffins from the academic community, but with the launch of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, we finally had a tool that could engage audiences and allow for participation.

There was only one problem: the media production houses that had dominated content development couldn't cope with the technology and instead profiled it as the source of all evil. Marty Rimm's study on cyberporn on the Internet became front page news for Time Magazine, and the WWW's frontier lawlessness transformed a vast global revolution for political and social participation and co-operation, into a seedy and often dangerous cesspool of pornographers, bomb-makers, neo-nazis and piraters of music, video, and literature.

Of course, regardless of its less-than-attractive profile, the media that had so maligned the competitor technology of the WWW were also some of the first organisations with a presence online, and traditional media news services in particular, had some of the highest hit rates for websites.

As the new century dawned, the growth in use of blogs and social software tools meant that those mainstream media hit rates and page rankings which influence Google search engine responses, have actually augmented mainstream media organisational profiles online.

But supporting that rapid growth was the explosion of innovation in social software tools such as blogging software and the rise of collaborative information production tools such as wiki. These amateur engines of information dissemination also supported old media production houses, generating discussion and debate about the content, legitimacy and complexity of mainstream media content.

US marketing consultant, Will Seccombe, noted last year that even a semi-interested person will rarely come across a story in the morning newspaper that they have not already heard about either from broadcast media or from their ritual pre-breakfast surfing of the Internet. But increasingly, semi-interested persons will probably also have made comments to blogs on news stories of interest long before they read the still "definitive" commentary presented in the traditional print press.

But is this really participation? While “netizens” may be well-informed by the range of media content channels to which they now have access, and while users of these channels may well have found their voices in discussions on blogs and other online forums, there is still some doubt about whether such behaviour represents increased participation or whether it is simply a matter of more communications channels for the same content.

Several commentators on the relationship between blogging and journalism have argued that blogs are dramatically different from traditional media, but that they play a useful role in checking the legitimacy of print and electronic media content. They are an extra line of defence in protecting the voice of the masses; a check and balance on the functionality of the Fourth Estate.

But they are not, in themselves, representative of participatory democracy, and they are not heralds of a “new media age”.

Rather than being a vehicle for human negotiation, these technologies instead represent the opportunity for expressing an opinion. Because they are elective, and because readerships tend to develop from lines of common interest rather than formal spaces for debate, these emergent technologies tend to produce communities of collective understanding and interpretation, not negotiated and critical debate.

It’s better than nothing I suppose, but participation in the probably poorly termed “new media age” is so limited to the narrow interests and narrower literacy of Internet users that it can hardly be considered a channel for democratic revolution. It can’t even be considered an “age”. Since the production of the printing press, and much later, the invention of the telephone, and broadcast media, there has been such a regular, slow release of media channels and telecommunications applications that it would be more accurate to describe us as living in a media and communications age that has so far lasted more than 500 years. The Internet, social software and other “new media” technologies are just the next phase in communication.

They’re not so much tools for participatory democracy, or the catalyst for change in the style of the industrial revolution, but they do represent the best opportunity for those with access to the technologies for entering into a community of interest, and having access to entertainment in a manner never before experienced. And to look on the bright side of this communications age, there’s probably many more applications and innovative technologies to come.