TASK 2-

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

Digital media has revolutionised the way audiences consume news through various ways such as citizen journalism and crowdsourcing which provides a pluralistic model for audiences as the audience play an active role in providing information for producers this could suggest audiences and producers play just an important part as each other.

The sharing between audiences and producers has allowed UGC to take place which can be done on social networking sites like YouTube, MySpace, Twitter and Facebook. Facebook created by Mark Zuckerburg in 2004 is the fastest growing social networking site which is closely followed by Twitter is mainly used by celebrities so their fans can follow them. Facebook was the new craze as there was more opportunity to be interactive with things like applications to suit your interests, games, and fanpages. Due to the lack of content with MySpace they changed their audience to young aspiring artists wanting to promote themselves on the site as they receive hits. An alternative method of rising to fame was Justin Bieber who rose to fame through his YouTube hits which later lead him onto being signed by a record label. Therefore social networking sites can be important for audiences as they have an active role in uploading content on the internet to promote themselves. The number of viewings is useful for producers to identify what the audience like.

According to Sherry Turkle social networking sites have isolated us from ‘real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is poor imitation of the real world.’ As you can do a lot with a click of the button on social network sites ‘technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human’ A real life FB suicide Simone Back posted a status saying ‘took all my pills be dead soon so bye bye everyone’ and none of her 1082 Facebook friends helped her. This hints at the problems with social networking sites like being hacked and having fake friends. Therefore this would affect the producers as they’ll have a negative publicity and emphasise the problem of FB.

Facebook makes money by targeted advertising s they store information about what a certain user likes and has adverts of similar styles increasing their likelihood of gaining profit. Therefore this would affect the producers as they’ll have a negative image. Furthermore you can never be sure if a person is really who they say they are as the internet is full of paedophiles that use social networking sites to create fake accounts to groom children. This again disadvantages the sites reputation as they are seen as unsafe therefore this lessen the power producers have although audiences can play an active role as the privacy settings allow you to limit who and what people can see.