Reflections – 26/11/09
January 4, 2010
Over the past 15 years, viewers have increasingly acted as participants in game shows, quizzes, talk shows and make-over programmes. Particularly the surge of reality television has boosted the participation of ‘ordinary people’ in broadcast productions (Teurlings, 2001). In addition, the popularity of personal and communal media (home movies, home videos, community television) has profoundly affected television culture, particularly since the 1980s. What is different in the digital era is that users have better access to networked media, enabling them to ‘talk back’ in the same multimodal language that frames cultural products formerly made exclusively in studios. This is partly due to the availability of cheap and easy-to-use digital technologies, which certainly should stimulate audiovisual production of audiovisual production, but a more important driver is the many internet channels, particularly UGC sites, that allow for do-it-yourself distribution.
Again, another article that backs up the idea that people have always been participants in media, it is just in the past the media and technology was not as freely available as it is nowadays, and with the popularity of YouTube, along with its ease of access and function, people are now creating content more than ever because they have a platform to do so. But surely, it can’t just be because YouTube is so easy to use as to why people are sharing their originally privatized bedroom cultures and reenactments with the world can it? There surely has to be other reasons …
