Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
What makes such phenomena interesting is not so much any im-
mediate kind of public sphere (blogosphere!) they might now make
possible, but the more general long-term change they represent, in
which our whole conception about how the media is structured, and
who has access to it, is changed. In place of the hierarchical mass-
media model of communication flowing from the centre outwards,
we glimpse a more distributed flat or bottom-up paradigm. It
means that media companies will be increasingly obliged to take
notice of the expectations of a new kind of consumer (and perhaps
even a new kind of subject); one who does not expect to be treated
as an anonymous invisible passive consumer, but an active user of
media, who is used to creating her own means of responding to
needs and desires.
Blogs are often cited as one of the principle phenomena of the so-
called 'Web 2:0', the name given to the conception of the World Wide
Web as a space for collaboration and reciprocal communication.
Among these developments are 'social network' software such as
MySpace, Bebo, FaceBook and Second Life (which involves users
interacting in a shared virtual three-dimensional space), or YouTube,
Flickr and del.icio.us, which respectively allow video clips, photo-
graphs and web bookmarks to be uploaded to the Web; 'peer-to-peer'
software such as Napster and BitTorrent for sharing digital music
and video files; powerful search engines, most famously Google; new
forms of public debate and self expression, such as blogs and
podcasts; and new forms of organizing and distributing knowledge,
such as Wikipedia. In particular the kinds of online communities
fostered by MySpace and other similar sites, for example Bebo and
Facebook, as well as link and file-sharing software such as Flickr and
de.li.co.us, are encouraging a new understanding of how it is possi-
ble to make the media responsive to personal needs and niche
concerns. It may be that most people do not take, at first anyway,
advantage of these possibilities. Nevetheless, such possibilities will
determine how the media will be structured and considered.
