When I read this, I couldn't help but think of the Big Three of social media: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These three start-up websites began as nothing, but launched into media powerhouses because of the intensity of users sharing content. All three of these sites began as the brainchild of young independent founders - they are not affiliated with any giant media network, agency or outlet. The content that they host and distribute was originally (and still is, for the most part) by the people and for the people. And while these three sites can and do run as their own singular platform (i.e. "on the margins of such institutions") big companies like Time, CNN or the New York Times can get in on the fun too- they have a Facebook page, Twitter account, and YouTube channel. Such things even can operate within their site, so that you can comment on an article via your Facebook, or watch a video embedded in the article, and then decide to follow them on Twitter. Such sites are increasingly important in our age of concentrated media ownership, where it seems like every type of media we see or hear is owned by a large conglomerate:
All of this makes for multiple platforms that people can use for their own purposes. This means that people can become journalists themselves, just by writing on the internet what is happening to them. This was the case in June 2009 during the post-election riots in Tehran. With no foreign journalists on the ground in Iran, average witnesses on the street began their own news coverage of the events- via cell phones and camcorders. The amount of raw footage that flooded YouTube during the riots has been described as “unprecedented,” where recent, uncensored and user-generated news “convey[ed] some of the immediacy of what is happening every day on the streets of Iran” (Tweeting). YouTube administrators even created a section for the riot videos and linked it to the front page, encouraging visitors to watch and put up more. More recently, Reddit made headlines as a powerful news source to be reckoned with when a user put up the breaking news and photos of a shooting in a movie theatre showing The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, long before any official news network had gotten wind of the situation. This kind of digital storytelling is beginning to make traditional and official news sources obsolete, in favor of the immediacy of citizen journalism. link: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/denver-resident-here-reddit-im-doing-my-best-to-update-this/260115/
Not only can people use digital means to share the news, but it democratizes in that it helps decide what becomes the news - it helps people get together and bring about change. Facebook is the organizer. Twitter is the rallying cry. And YouTube is the proof. Two good examples of this are the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the protests of the Arab Spring, both of which got their organizational start on Facebook and Twitter, with the shocking and graphic outcomes in the videos posted on YouTube. Major news outlets took note, at times calling them "Twitter revolutions" because of their origins.
TIME pdf infographic: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/pdf/20110321_1848vs2011.pdf
"The aim of digital storytelling is not to produce media for broadcast but to produce 'conversational media': 'much of what we help people create would not easily stand alone as broadcast media, but, in the context of conversation, it can be extraordinarily powerful'."
Media has become intensely conversational - watch the news, and at the bottom there is a scroll of tweets. Senior correspondents and experts respond to questions taken from Facebook or Twitter. Watch a tv show, and there is a hashtag inviting you to live tweet with the cast and crew and fellow fans. Entire sections of talk shows are devoted to answering Tweets or responding to Facebook comments. All articles online have a comment section. Or they want a thumbs up or down, upvote or downvote, like or dislike, make a video response, they want you to choose your reaction from an assortment of smiley faces or tags, or to like or share or Google plus or digg or tweet it. I have even seen a section where you can respond to an article by choosing a song. It seems like everything on the internet or television or radio is a part of conversation - everything you see or hear wants you to say something back. Whether a comment, a yay or nay, or to answer or ask a question, media has become so conversational and interactive that sometimes it can be overwhelming, and make you wish for the days when you can just read or listen to something passively and in peace, without being asked to do anything in return.
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