Looking at now in the 21st century, with the uprising of technology and the Internet, in comparison to when the bullet theory was formed before the Internet existed, the relationship between the media and its audience has changed to a certain extent. Members of an audience may not only be consumers of the media text but also producers of their own media forms about that text. This is basically informing us that no longer are we just consumers of media, but we are also contributors ourselves. With the Internet, before absorbing or being ‘injected’ by views and values transmitted by TV shows, the news or radio, we tend to validate what we hear, it is now about what the audience does with the media. It appears as though we are no longer a part of a mass audience, the internet as a converged medium of communication has made it very easy for people to make and distribute their own media products, unlike when the bullet theory was configured where there was one direct path of communication and no way for the receiver to communicate back. However, in saying all of this, the media still holds a powerful position as it always has, as the role of mass media – particularly journalism – is considered vital because it provides the information which enables citizens to make decisions about how to act within a democratic society.
Elizabeth Bird introduces in the text ‘Are we all Produsers now?’ the term ‘produser’ representing the merging of the producer and consumer in an interactive environment, has been widely embraced as representing an entirely new way of seeing the media audience. An example for such produsage can be seen in the collaborative development of open source software, the distributed multi-user spaces of the Wikipedia, where the audience are able to not only communicate amongst themselves about media but also to participate in the creation of digital content, voicing their own opinion and review on media issues and becoming a part of the media themselves.