Has technology made the media more democratic?

In the past, the media in society was less democratic as it was harder for the public to share and discuss their own view points. This was due to people not being about to voice their opinions in the papers – they could submit something that they wanted to put in the newspaper but there was no guarantee it would be put in them. Also, not many people could afford TV's meaning only the rich had them - even for people who had them, there was very limited channels to view the news on.  Recently, social media forms like Facebook and Twitter has allowed people to share their views which then makes it easier to influence other people. Due to the proliferation of technology, every person now has the ability to comment on any kind of video and share the opinions freely with more people than ever viewing it, more people can share their views on what is happening around the world and make up comedy videos about people we dislike thus enabling them to voice their opinions like a true democratic country.  

Due to Web 2.0, there are more outlets for citizen journalists to post their opinions and articles online. Dan Gillmor claimed that, "...news was being produced by regular people who had something to say and show, and not solely by the “official” news organisations that had traditionally decided how the first draft of history would look". A citizen journalist is an individual who writes about the news and publishes their findings to inform more people. For example, on the 3rd October 2017 there was a shooting in Las Vegas which resulted in 58 deaths and injured more than 500 others. All over Facebook and Twitter people have been showing their support for the lives of people in Las Vegas – Twitter users started a #gunviolence campaign to help cut down on the number of guns in American states. On Facebook however, many people who saw the shooting happen started posting videos of the after match. This shows how easy it is for people to get hold of footage and share it for millions of people to see quickly without having to wait for the story to come up on the news and you also get to see all the inside news of what's going on. 

There is, however, a negative side to 'We Media' according to Andrew Keen. He claims that, "There will be over five hundred million blogs by 2010, collectively corrupting and confusing popular opinion about everything from politics, to commerce to arts and culture. Blogs have become so dizzyingly infinite that they’ve undermined our sense of what is true and false..." recently, due to so many people being able report what is going on meaning amateurs are now taking over the media which allows more and more fake news to be published online. One example of fake news is when it was published that Google was buying Apple – the story claimed that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, put the purchase price at as little as $9 billion in his will. The story was quickly retracted. The thought that fake news can be posted so easily and widely within a small amount of time can be terrifying, as the public will soon begin to lose trust and begin to wonder if anything we are actually being told it true. 

In my opinion, I agree with theorist Andrew Keen. This is due to all of the fake news that I have come across myself through Facebook - It is remarkably easy for myself and any reasonable person to make up a story and post it online due to web 2.0 for anybody and everybody to see. In a survey at the end of 2016, 17 percent of respondents agreed that social media sites should be more responsible for ensuring that people are not exposed to fake news showing that not many people are that bothered about fake news, or does it just show that they cannot recognise fake news from real news? However, a larger share believed that it was the duty of the reader themselves to stop the widespread of fake news but should it really be up to us to decide whether or not something is real or fake? Or should we just be able read down are newsfeeds and look on your computer without having to wonder if it's true or not. 

It will be hard to predict what will happen in the future of the media due to the controversy caused by the unregulated content that can be posted online. It could go two different ways - the internet could represent a similar situation to web 1.0 when the internet could only be read and not wrote or the internet could stay in the situation it is which is web 2.0 meaning anybody and everybody can post their views.