The entire idea central to this intrigues me. This reality that we, the audience; the listeners; the viewers; the congregation of consumers, have a voice. Thanks, internet, and your various pathways and passages to greater social communication.

“The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all.” — (Rosen, J. (2006) The People Formerly Known as the Audience)

Of course, in 2006 this was more or less teetering on the outer edges of the web 2.0; Rosen had posted this just a few months succeeding the creation of Twitter. At this point, Facebook (after only just dropping the infamous ‘The’) was well on its way to global domination, with the likes of other (soon to be giants) YouTube, Flickr and Tumblr very much on the same path. Having grown up alongside this expansion of social media and the rising (at least, dominant) age of the internet, of course it’s hard to imagine anything else; when Brain spoke of a broadcast era and the initial introduction of rap music into the world my mind races. To have seen (and maybe welcomed) the beginnings of the things we now take for granted, or those that exist as background noise among the ventures of everyday life, would have been something of a glorious experience; although I always find myself stumped on the question of whether or not it would have been as powerful or as interesting as it is in retrospect. Today, when things happen, do we/how will we know what’s going to stick (part of this virally-oriented world we live in) and become this ‘big’ thing (like the creation of hip-hop, or colour film, or even film with sound!), and sometimes I wonder if all those moments have been and gone. Is it just the retrospective element that make these things as exciting to me as they are? Would they have been as exciting if I had witnessed them firsthand? Ah, the beauty of life.

“You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.” — (Rosen, J. (2006) The People Formerly Known as the Audience)