Now that the research has been completed, we cannot help but feedback to the online community, contributing to and sharing what others provide. Looking at 21st century online society, with the uprising of technology and the Internet the relationship between the media and its audience has dramatically changed. Sue Turnbull, (Sue Turnbull, “Imagining the Audience”, 2010), suggests that 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. Unlike before the internet where the audience was absorbing or being ‘injected’ by views and values transmitted by TV shows, the news or radio, we now tend to validate what we hear, it is as Sue Turnbull says ‘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. Elizabeth Bird introduces the term ‘produser’, (Elizabeth Bird, “Are we all Producers now?” 2011), representing the merging of the producer and consumer in an interactive environment, as it 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. Looking at the evolution of medias relationship with its audience, the online community is gaining more power through technological advances realigning the roles of audiences and producers in profoundly new ways.
All acknowledgments for this image go to: http://produsage.org/produsage
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