My brief was to join a focus group which would research social media to decide whether it would be practicable to use it within my workplace, a State government department. There started my particular interest in social media. I was already hooked on Facebook, had a profile on Twitter (as myself, as President of Society of Editors (WA), and as the self-titled Communications Manager of my husband’s small business, The Water’s Edge) and I had a profile on LinkedIn, and this blog. I was immersed in the media without really knowing why, how it could benefit me, or if so desired, it could bring in revenue. My work brief elevated my research to a higher level and my research took me to many different sites, online marketers and social media consultants, and an array of personal opinions, and self-taught experts. If these people were so-called experts in a media that had feasibly only been around for the last five years, why couldn’t I learn it and become one too?

What is the attraction to social media in all its forms? Who are these people blogging, posting, commenting, IMing, SMSing and publishing their thoughts, aspirations, admirations, hopes and dreams? Who says they have the right, or are qualified, or are good enough? Surely they should be monitored, edited, censored, rewritten, selected, and rejected like the rest of us? What nerve, hide, confidence they have; all the better to criticize with.

It is within this arena that I pose the questions:
• What is meant by participatory media?
• How does the concept of participatory media affect working within a public sphere?
• What is authorship in a world of ‘prosumers’?

Introduction

By using Mark Zuckerberg’s quote as the title, I’m certainly not holding him up as a guru to be worshipped in this space. I’m merely noting that trends, ideas, and technological platforms change almost daily in the so-called blogosphere and it is a constant task keeping up with new the information, blogs, websites, and applications that are available.

What is meant by participatory media?

Over the last few years with the advent of Internet and the emerging global digital culture, and more recently the adoption of Web 2.0, the online platform has developed into what some call a ‘participatory media culture’ including the professional sectors of journalism, advertising, marketing, communications, and public relations. What this means is that professional amateurs (pro-ams) have been able to interact online with existing content creators. This first happened by posting comments, interacting with online forums or wikis, then by blogging in their own name or acting as a guest blogger, and more recently by actively publishing on participatory or news aggregation websites or blogs. The blog (web log) started off generally as a one-to-many platform but increasingly acts as a many-to-many gateway with contributors who co-create.

Dan Gillmor (2002) in his own weblog eJournal said: ‘In the 10 years since its mass adoption, the Web has quickly become a reflection of our elaborate social networks. It has evolved into a powerful medium for communication and collaboration, as evidenced by the hypertext links of more than 10 billion documents authored by millions of people and organizations around the world.’

Bowman and Willis (2003) say, ‘It is the greatest publishing system ever known, and it keeps growing. In May 2003, there were at least 40.4 million Web sites with thousands being added, moved or removed every day. It’s a phenomenally extraordinary achievement, which has emerged without central planning and with¬out government regulation, censor or sanction — an emergent, bottom-up process (p 15). They add that ‘estimates of the number of active weblogs vary widely from 500,000 to as high as 1 million. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more than 8 million U.S. Internet users (7 percent) have created a weblog and 90 mil¬lion (84 percent) have participated in online groups’ (p 17).

More recently, Wikipedia states that as of 16 February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence, growing in number each day.

While reporting, whether it be reporting news, celebrity gossip and events, or posting one’s own ideas and opinions, was once determined as upstream or downstream communication (effectively the wise all-knowing media company would provide the information), it has developed into a two-way symmetrical ‘citizen journalism’. Bowman and Willis (2003, p 9) describe citizen or ‘participatory journalism’ as:

The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.

In his 2002 book The Deviant’s Advantage, Wacker identifies what he calls ‘abolition of context’. He says this comes about with rapid change in technology and the effect it has on society. Once change inexorably occurs at the rate it is now happening, it is difficult for organizations and the society at large to find reference points that were once easy to identify. This is all too reminiscent for us with the advent of Web 2.0 and the interactivity of consumer and producer. No familiar reference points such as age, location, cultural background can be established which make this online world a global community. Blogs ‘allow their users to hide those social markers, such as age, gender, and ethnic origins, which often inhibit subordinated social groups from participating in public debate’ (Lister 2011). It’s open slather online, albeit with guidelines.

In 2002, Wacker believed, ‘Context is the framework, the structure, the collective common understanding that allows us to live our lives and run our businesses. Take it away and it’s all but impossible to know what’s the right or wrong action to take.’ The nascent Internet and online world has developed since then, and there is arguably a new common understanding being developed for society to act in new contexts.

Examples

An example of a participatory news site is Now Public. The slogan for the site is ‘crowd powered media’ and ‘the news is now public’. This is taken from the site’s ‘About’ page:

NowPublic is a multimedia online news magazine where you can make, break, shape, and share international news as it happens. NowPublic offers its 5 million monthly readers a unique hybrid of content, context and conversation. Articles on the trending issues of the day are written and assembled by contributors who provide relevant background, photos, videos and Tweets needed to understand and join the digital dialogue. NowPublic’s reporters file stories from 6,000 cities in 160 countries – eyewitness accounts, expertise, and facts with the scope needed to make sense of them.

At first investigation, it might be supposed that the citizen journalist is a tyro writer, randomly posting with little thought to ramifications or online protocols (and no doubt some of these do exist in cyberspace). However, the top sites that celebrate aggregation of content from their audience have strict guidelines for writers. Some of the writers are journalists testing their expertise in different areas. Others are true interested citizens, well informed in their communities. NowPublic has strict rules on defining news, posting a story, best practices, house style, and understanding keywords and trends. Joe or Jane Bloggs would find this daunting. What it does provide is an open media that encourages co-creation and collaboration. This could be called a convergence culture that ‘serves both as a mechanism to increase revenue and further the agenda of industry, while at the same time enabling people – in terms of their identities as producers and consumers, professionals as well as amateurs – to enact some kind of agency regarding the omnipresent messages and commodities of this industry’ (Deuze 2007, p 247).

News aggregation site approaches participatory journalism in a slightly different way by providing links to other blogs and stories by many writers. In this way, the site acts as a referral to approved writers, bloggers and sites which follow their protocols and publish appropriate stories.

Creative writing sites have used the participatory model for some time with sites such as and . These sites allow audience members to offer the next plotline in a story or provide a different ending. Most of these types of sites require the writer to register and write their first post. If that is deemed appropriate, they are accepted into the stable of writers (generally for no fee which is also a bonus for the organization; the writer gets recognition).

How does the concept of participatory media affect working within a public sphere?

Singer (1998) announced the end of the journalist as ‘gatekeeper’ while Bruns (2005) described the journalist as being now more of a ‘gatewatcher’. Deuze (2007) saw that the ‘one-dimensional view of media power has changed, as the agricultural metaphor of production and consumption is increasingly becoming an untenable assumption’ (p 258). The concept of the media as being all powerful has forever changed. Even more in a society where monopoly of the media is de rigueur, powerful individuals can no longer wield that power; it is empowerment for the consumer. The public sphere debate has shifted with individuals now able to build power bases, recognition, influence and followers by representing the ‘small perspective’; those perspectives that the conglomerates had no time or budget to indulge in. ‘The public sphere is already “infected” with group interests… In a “globalised” world the media has largely taken the place of the old public sphere meeting places where citizens would gather to hear information, debate ideas or courses of action, or voice their dissent’ (Study Guide, p 29). The public sphere’s ‘infection’ with the interests of the group offers up differing perspectives and provides a multi-layered online discourse that is shaking the majors of media in their boots. Society is trending back to the soapbox, the public meeting places where every little person could have a say. The soapbox is now online.

The participatory contexts available online include discussion groups, forums, message boards, mailing lists, chat rooms, instant messaging, news groups, blogs, Facebook profiles and pages, videoblogs, podcasts, and wikis. Within these larger frameworks sit concepts such as ranking, polls, quizzes, mini forums, posting to blogs, comments and RSS feeds which all provide an avenue for distributed discussion allowing the creator to be publisher, commentator, moderator, writer and documentarian. This ‘publish then filter’ concept (rather than the traditional ‘filter then publish’ paradigm) has an immediacy and intimacy which whether synchronous or asynchronous is a very powerful tool for the participatory audience. The best sites have a mediated public and have four unique properties (adapted from Boyd 2007, p 2):

• Persistence. What you say sticks around.
• Searchability. Today’s teens can be found in their hangouts with the flick of a few keystrokes.
• Replicability. Digital bits are copyable.
• Invisible audiences.

What is authorship in a world of ‘prosumers’?

In 1980, Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave, coined the term ‘prosumer’ meaning the merging of the roles of producer and consumer. He first discussed the concept in his 1970 book, Future Shock. At the time, he was referring to the mass customization of products, and for businesses to get any continuing profit, consumers would have to become part of the design process because of changing needs. This 40-year-old concept is appropriate to the merging of boundaries between reader/writer, creator/consumer, blogger/audience, journalist/reader and any other dichotomies of relationship on the Internet.

Deuze (2005) says, ‘If the process of telling stories, making meaning and sharing mediated experiences becomes more participatory and collaborative … it becomes crucial to understand the roles of the producer and the consumer as (to some extent) interchangeable and (at the very least) interdependent.’ Nearly seven years on, I think it is unrealistic to try to understand these ever-changing roles in a ‘liquid media’. In a past media environment, understanding may have been crucial. Today, it is the participating that is crucial, the guidelines and protocols which must be followed, and the content created. The journalist, business owner, or media mogul has now become a ‘forum leader, or a mediator rather than simply a teach¬er or lecturer. The audience becomes not con¬sumers, but “pro-sumers”, a hybrid of consumer and producer’ (Bowman and Willis 2003, p 14).

As witness to this online platform of change with its plurality of authorship, mediated but unfiltered writing, and dismembering of the power base that once was a media monopoly, I wonder if Roland Barthes may have been a visionary when he wrote in 1967, ‘We know that in order to restore writing to its future, we must reverse the myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author’ (Barthes 1986, p 55).

References

Barthes, R 1986, ‘The death of the author’, in The rustle of language, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 49-55.

Bowman, S and Willis, C 2003, We Media, API Media Center paper, <http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/download/we_media.pdf> , (accessed 19 August 2004), viewed 24 April 2011.

Boyd, D 2007, ‘Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?’, Knowledge Tree 13, May, <http://kt.flexiblelearning.net.au/tkt2007/?page_id=28>.

Bruns, A 2011, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond, From production to produsage: research into user-led content creation, <http://produsage.org/>, viewed 24 April 2011.

Business Insider, War Room 2011, Facebook strategy revealed: Move fast and break things!, <http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-innovation-highlights-2010-2>, viewed 24 April 2011.

Deuze, M 2007, Convergence culture in the creative industries, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Sage Publications, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, doi: 10.1177/13678779076793.

Gillmor, D 2002, ‘Journalistic Pivot Points’ in his weblog eJournal on SiliconValley.com, March 27, 2002, <http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/ejournal/2946748.htm> viewed 23 April 2011.

Lister, M et al. 2011, New Media a critical introduction second edition, <http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415431613/>, viewed 24 April 2011.

Pew Internet & American Life Project 2002, Internet Activities chart, The statistic on weblogging is dated September 2002, <http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/chart.asp?img=Internet_A8.htm>.

Toffler, A 1970, Future Shock, Random House, US.

Toffler, A 1980, The Third Wave, Bantam Books, US.

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