Last week on New Media Mogul I raised the issue of democracy within ‘citizen media’ by talking about the athletes’ blogs at the Beijing Olympics. While the idea of a blog is to encourage its owner to write about whatever they feel like, athletes have been warned that they cannot talk about the performances of other athletes and other such things, which kind of takes some of the democracy out of their blogging experiences at the games.
This leads me to thinking more widely about how democracy functions in different ways and on different levels within the media landscape. From a holistic point of view, the mass media is democratic to the point that while the Government regulates mass media, the mass media is free to create and distribute any content that does not contravene these regulations without interference from the Government.
On this level, user-generated content enjoys a greater level of democracy, considering that its main means of distribution is the Internet and in Australia regulation of the Internet really only extends to pornography and gambling. So provided that user-generated content does not contravene these regulations, there is also the freedom to create and distribute any content.
Individual democracy within the mass media is tightly controlled by the corporations that control the proprietary media networks. Newspapers set aside pages where a careful selection of opinions from the general public are published on a daily basis. Some television shows also encourage interactivity – whether it is SMS voting, emails, letters or in some cases talkback. Talkback radio has been put forward as a particularly democratic medium, but ultimately while considerable time might be devoted to the opinions of individuals by this medium, not all callers can get through as their opinions may be too controversial or just not interesting enough.
User-generated content and the sites devoted to its hosting encourage a much more fluidic democracy – some sites will promote a dialogue between an individual who has created a piece of work and the viewers of that work, while other sites are read/write in the sense that users can change the work of others, or build upon it. This read/write process is known as collective intelligence and is encouraged by sites like Wikipedia and movements such as creative commons with its ‘share and share alike’ philosophy.
The idea of ‘collective intelligence’ is such an interesting one to me – never before has it been so easy for individuals to collaborate on creating media and the success of this collaboration will determine the success of UGC as an alternative medium. How individuals, sporting organizations and media professionals address the potential drawbacks of collective intelligence is essential, given the influential nature of media within society, and this is an area that I will be working on in much greater depth.
