What is the difference between active and passive audience? With the advancement of technology, consumers rely a lot on mobility and flexibility of digital devices capable of processing information in high speed ie. smartphones, tablets, laptops. And with the rise in social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more, it is so easy for one to produce “home videos” to express one’s views and opinion of the world.

These are the basic ingredients for an active audience to make some home made appetisers to wet the taste buds of other media consumers who might be active on both mainstream and new media platforms, then leaving comments, sharing, liking or thumbs up-ing, and so on. This sparks the whole cycle of the active audience. It basically is having the audience to participate and takes a step further from just consumer media texts presented to them on mainstream media.

The argument goes on with regards to where the power lies, is it with big media broadcasting companies or with the audience who are actively uploading content from their bedroom. However, both wouldn’t exist without the existence of the other. Take the news for example. Back then, people turn on the news to gather information on current affairs and general interests, it was a mean for the government to reach out to the public, a tool for propaganda, and a playground for advertises to bring on their ‘A’ game to promote products to various target audience. Today, we have the term, “citizen journalism”, which in wikipedia’s definition, “is based upon public citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing, and disseminating news and information””. Is this an easy way out for news companies to gather news in the environment? Or is this a clever way to engage in audience participation in hopes of increasing their viewership? In business terms, there’s a saying, “The customer’s always right, even when they are wrong.”. Applying that to the citizen journalism scenario, user generated content (UGC) has been on the rise recently in online social media networks, in a nutshell, news made by the audience for the audience. In some ways, it’s driving news companies into bankruptcy, in other ways, it’s aiding them, depending on how the news companies employ such citizen journalists.

We are living in times where a single comment or status on your Facebook could just as easily go viral for the right OR wrong reasons. This power can be used to enrich, but also exploited when in the wrong hands. Quoting a line from the first Spider Man movie, “With great power comes great responsibility”. We have this idea that we have total control of what we post on the internet, but are we really a hundred percent sure? We never know what goes behind the scenes of all these multilevel databases and servers and what they do with the things we post online, and for some cases, it may just be our identity or financial status.

The audience definitely has a say in the media world, a very significant role in fact, but just how long will the audience hold power? Or are they just placed in a delusion that they are in power by the media corporations?