Us and The Machine

"The Machine is Us/ing Us"

The name of the YouTube film shown to us during Thursday’s lecture brought to mind an old debate. I remember sitting in my A-Level media studies lessons with the words ‘are media consumers active or passive?’ scrawled across the board. Do we sit and take in everything the media machine feeds us, like a big hypodermic needle to the head? Or are we the ones in control, picking and choosing what we wish to see, hear and read?

And with the technology available in the form of Web 2.0, it seems that many people in Britain have become the latter. We can create our own content through blogging and Wikis. We can tailor our daily media diet to our own personal taste using RSS feeds. Previously we may have just ranted at the newspaper over the breakfast table, but now we can use commenting to express our thoughts the second we finish reading. Web 2.0 has given us a more prominent voice than we’ve ever known before.

But is this shiny new online world really the true ‘people’s democracy’ that it’s cracked up to be? Even amongst our course of media-literate, educated 20-somethings, the vast majority claim never to have blogged or used RSS before, and the task of signing up to social bookmarking sparked many frantic facebook status updates of “so-and-so is totally confused by mento and del.icio.us!!!” If even people like us are not fully up to scratch with what’s happening online, then what about those older, poorer or simply with less spare time? Surely there are many who just don’t have the option to become one of these new empowered, active media consumers? Where are they represented in Web 2.0?

For example, people who undertake manual work are not sat in front of a computer all day with google reader open in one browser window and YouTube in another as they tap away on Excel at the same time. If they own computer, it is likely to be used for practical, time-saving tasks such as doing the family shop at Tesco.com rather than writing lengthy bogs and uploading home-edited videos. And what about the many people living below the breadline who can’t even afford a computer in the first place? The fact that we can upload clips of terrorist attacks filmed on our mobiles to the BBC website doesn’t mean very much to someone without the money to buy a video phone. These people have no option but to take in what the media feeds them in the old-fashioned ‘hypodermic needle’ way because Web 2.0 requires money as well as some technical know-how. If a revolution in the way we consume and create media is indeed taking place online, then shouldn’t everyone’s voices be part of this? Or has it already been decided that the voices of the elderly and impoverished are simply not important or relevant enough to partake?