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 for new/digital media has provided the audience with an illusion an increase of power. Audiences may feel like they can get their voice heard and possibly tackle large institutions; however, this is not the case. It still remains that these large institutions are in fact injecting information and dripfeeding ideologies to the audiences like the hypodermic needle, therefore institutions such as Google continue to grow and control the vast majority of the internet. This is evident as the  chief executive of NewsCorp wrote in a letter to the EU claiming of the “Overwhelming power of Google” as UGC websites in effect provide audiences with power to become active producers rather than passive consumers such as YouTube; these webistes that allow audiences to generate their own media content are owned by these large media institutions, like Google, therefore posting any of your own content on YouTube is in effect owned by Google.

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.

A pluralist perspective suggests that one of the ways the audience is more powerful is that they can now engage with the news via comments, questions and answers, even dating sites as seen on The Guardian. New/digital media has allowed the audience to interact with the news and access it more freely. A new concept that supports this is citizen journalism which has been on the rise ever since one of its first examples being the Rodney King video of the police beating him up after a high speed car chase; which in turn started  riots in LA in America. This had shown how effective citizen journalism is as ordinary people now are able to break news and report on things they may have seen or heard. A theorist in support of the pluralistic argument is Al Gore as he states that “the internet is an empowering tool.. and exciting and revolutionary prospect.” In many ways Al Gore is right as it has empowered many ordinary people into reporting news.

However, to the contrary, the top 5% of all websites accounted for 75% of user volume a study shows by Lin and Webster in 2002. This shows that new/digital media if anything, has made the rich more powerful as the minority serve the majority according to Paretos law. Google and Amazon are perfect examples of how these large institutions serve the majority and continue to grow over time. Google are continuously growing and adapting to the point of where they are researching and experimenting in almost every department such as travel, health and so on with their new projects; they seem to be too big of a company for the internet itself causing them to go into other specialised fields. Also, Amazon are following Google with their experimentation; Amazons CEO Jeff Bezos had recently admitted that he has made billions of dollars out of the failures at Amazon. Therefore regardless of new/digital media it remains that large institutions who dominate the media will continue to do so as Herman and Chesney anticipated in 1997 that “The internet and the digital revolution do not pose an immediate or even foreseeable threat to the market power of the media giants.”

In conclusion I believe that the new/digital media has provided power to audiences as many of the large media institutions have grown from people who once were an audience of the internet itself; therefore the growing advance in technology does allow audiences to express themselves and voice their opinions to an extent. However, it does show that we may be encapsulated by the developments of new/digital media that we may feel in control but are in fact being controlled by these large institutions and are being shown what we want to and what media institutions want to show us. 




Learner response

The development of New/Digital media means that the audience is more powerful in terms of consumption and production. In recent years the rise of the internet and the UGC platforms have allowed audiences to embrace all the benefits of finally being able to make an evident difference; people can become celebrities simply by voicing their opinion or being themselves through the internet. Also, audiences are able to consume a variety of media in whichever way they want to via video, text, audio, and they can also consume whatever content they want to.