Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
term and concept of voting in China, send 'a message of support' to
their favourite performer. Given that a pilot of the official Chinese
Central TV version of the programme, which presumably did not
involve voting, failed, it suggests that the real empowerment related
to being able to intervene with and alter mass media.
In 2006, in response to such developments, the British broadsheet
newspaper
The Observer
ran an investigative article about the future
of television. It started with a description of how a future sixteen-
year old called Chloe will be watching television in the year 2016.
8
According to the article Chloe 'keeps up with text and video
messages by unrolling a paper-thin screen from wherever she is. A
tiny camera beams images from her day to a video diary on her
personal website, which interacts with those of her friends.' It
continues to describe how Chloe will watch television on demand in
a world without CDs or DVDs, TV listings or TV schedules, but with
websites geared specifically for teenage girls, with narrowcast
content made by independent broadcast companies or even by other
teenagers. This is already beginning to happen, with the ever-greater
availability of television content on the World Wide Web, not least
through the BBC's new iPlayer, which allows BBC programmes to be
watched for a week afterwards, and even downloaded. It seems likely
that broadcasting, as we currently understand the term, is in the
process of being radically changed.
The notion that new information communications technologies
offer the possibility of a kind of bottom up model of organization
that can dispense, in part at least, with hierarchies of authority, is
most famously embodied in Wikis and, in particular, the Wikipedia
(illus. 51). Wikis are websites that can be edited by viewers, and the
Wikipedia is the most famous example of a wiki, being an online
encyclopaedia that anyone can add to or edit. The idea that a process
of this sort should be open to all is also found in one of the most
important and potentially revolutionary concepts emerging out of
new media, that of 'open source'. This is largely concerned with the
