Participatory Online Media - Class 6 PDF Download

Introduction

With the emergence of the new media, the participation of the citizens in the online platform has become prominent. It allows ordinary citizens to produce and disseminate content quickly to a broader audience. The World Wide Web (WWW) provides a place for information sharing to hungry citizens about the events happening in the world. It also offers a cheaper way for news organizations, interest groups, or amateurs and enthusiasts to deliver to their prospective consumers. The new forms of participatory media have made ‘two-way’ conversation possible between the broadcaster/ publisher and the reader/viewer from that of a “lecturer” speaking to a passive “audience.”
The participatory online culture has been one of the great promises of the new media. Early writers such as Rheingold (1994) envisaged the rise of a virtual public sphere, whereas Turkle (1995) saw the identity as being able to become much more fluid and changeable in the virtual world of cyberspace. The scope for new media to be more participatory arose from its apparent structural differences from the forms of mass communication that had been predominant media models in 20th-century societies. The concept of participatory media predates the rise of the Internet and networked ICTs. The sense that mainstream commercial media have failed to meet specific objectives of the responsibility of the press and their inability to serve as a forum for the exchange of comment and criticism acted as a stimulus for the development of various forms of alternative media.
The rise of interactive media platforms has made untrained news professionals be more directly engaged with news events than ever before. The relatively low cost of new media creation technologies allowed any digital media literate citizen from any place of origin to create her/his own interactive news media. This kind of media is known as ‘online participatory media. It includes weblogs as well as Internet chat-rooms, wireless communication systems, and mobile phones. In some Asian countries, young people use mobile phones as their primary vehicle for going online. In this Unit, we shall discuss the online participatory media process and how the public gets engaged in the new media environment by using it as a potential tool in the democratic process.

Approaches to Participation

In recent years, ‘participation’ has become a common concept that appears in debates of social sciences and humanities. Although some level of citizen participation is generally understood as something positive and necessary in democratic societies, a discrepancy exists concerning the level of intensity of this participation. Different disciplines are debating on issues related to the extent of allowing citizen participation, their needs, and preferences in the decision-making processes, and perhaps to identify the sectors of society that are still unrepresented. The literature on participation, including media and participation, has produced many different positions.
There are mainly two main approaches:

Sociological Approach
The sociological approach defines participation as taking part in particular social processes, a definition that casts a vast net. In this approach, participation includes many types of human interaction in combination with interactions through texts and technologies. Power is not excluded from this approach but remains one of the many secondary concepts to support it. Within media studies, the sociological approach can be found in how James Carey defined the ritual model of communication in his famous work on Communication as Culture, as the ‘representation of shared beliefs.’ For Carey, the ritual model of communication is explicitly linked to notions of ‘sharing, participation, association, fellowship and the possession of a common faith.’

Political Approach

It refers to the equalization of power inequalities in particular decision-making processes. Hence, participation is defined as the equalization of power relations between privileged and non-privileged actors in formal or informal decision-making processes. The political approach also emphasizes that participation is an object of struggle and that different ideological projects defend different participatory intensities.

Online Participation and Engagement

Participatory culture is a term that is often used to talk about the apparent link between more accessible digital technologies, user-generated content, and some kind of shift in the power relations between media industries and their consumers. Another aspect of interactive participatory media is that it enables citizens in different countries to converse directly with one another without meeting each other, and without the mediating help of governments or commercial media.
By creating new opportunities os for cross-border, citizen-to-citizen communications, weblogs, and other forms of interactivity, participatory media is seen as a potential vehicle for cross-border non-governmental activism and citizen diplomacy. In this new media environment, the media is being transformed by new technologies. This transformation will lead to a loss of control by professionals over news reporting and dissemination of information about events around the world. The new media environment is in the process of creating a new model in which information flows both ways.
An essential difference between traditional and interactive participatory media is regarding how the information flows. Interactive participatory media transforms a one-way conversation between media and “audience” into a conversation with an “information community.” The term “community” here implies a web of multi-directional relationships and exchanges.
Within traditional media, information flow is linear and unidirectional, where the information goes from sources to journalists, to editors, publications, or broadcasts, and then to the audience. Online participatory media creates a non-linear and multi-directional information flow. Usually, from a blogger/joumalist/web publisher or such a group of people, information and opinion go out to an interactive media site. The information is then consumed by members of the information community, many of whom react to the original “post” and add their contributions in the form of comments at the bottom of that “post.”

Public Engagement in the New Media Environment

Online participatory media enables more people in different countries to communicate with each other more easily and directly than ever before, without depending on governments or professional media to enable and mediate this conversation. Such cross-border conversations can be channelized to bridge significant cultural and digital divides. The newness of online participatory media is its ability to perform the following functions:
(a) link quickly, aggregate, and share information from a vast number of sources;
(b) derive meaning from this jumble of information through commentary;
(c) spontaneously generate online discussion communities around any given piece of information;
(d) enable discussion communities concerned with a particular issue to multiply and mutate in a rapid, self-replicating viral manner across the Internet.
The public engagement via online media is not motivated by a desire for profit but with a desire to improve the state of the world where the bloggers voice daily concerns on their weblogs. Yale Law School, Professor Yochai Benkler, argues that the shift is now taking place in the developed world from a physical, industrial-based economy to a “networked information economy” making activities based on volunteerism, philanthropy, and the desire for social justice more likely in cyberspace than in the physical economy.
The most exciting aspect of new media technologies is their ability to remove the costs associated with the processes of dissemination and facilitation of discussion. Even though the process of gathering quality, first-hand information will remain expensive, the nature of online participatory media offers the potential to use public financing and charitable donations much more effectively and efficiently in ways that are not possible with conventional forms of media.