Moral Panic

David Gauntlett – opposes media censorship and the vulnerability stereotype sees youth as active and literate compared to vulnerable and needing protection.

Henry Jenkins – video game effects research suggests instead of audiences being passive they are active and engaged in multiple communications.

Richard Berger – Ofcom will subsume the BBFC and become one, large regulatory body.

David Gauntlett – the prosumer creates a world of independent media producers.

Andrew Keen – the prosumer creates a world of ‘amateurs’.

Daniel Chandler – online genre proliferation: new media has increasingly led to the questioning of the boundaries and conventions of genre as traditionally studied.

Michael Wesch – YouTube as cultural phenomenon: here the value of YouTube is being acknowledged with the availability and access to resources it provides being taken for granted despite it origination in recent history, 2006.

Charlie Brooker – blurred boundaries, representation of ‘the real’. Brooker is suggesting that many texts and their availability on a number of interactive platforms has made people question what is real as what is not.

Dan Gillmor – makes key points about the relationship between technology and ‘We Media’

Stuart Price – critical of global media and ownership

Noam Chomsky – Marxist readings on media ownership

Nick Lacey – on synergy, ownership and institution referencing the concepts of synergy and convergence as crucial to modern media.

David Gauntlett: a media theorist who has written extensively on digital and social media and who has explored the concept of the Prosumer – the blurring of boundaries between audiences who consume media, e.g. audiences watching a film and those who produce a fim and upload it onto their YouTube channel or Vimeo or Flickr for example (Vimeo and Flickr have a stronger filmmaking ‘community’). Gauntlett argued in ‘Making is Connecting’ there is a shift from a “sit back and be told" culture to a “making and doing" culture.

Andrew Keen: provides an alternative argument to Gauntlett suggesting that this ‘long tail’ of independent projects simply creates ‘a world of amateurs’ where the quality of media production is undermined by the prosumer.

Chris Anderson: popularised the theory of the long tail which when mapped onto online media consumption suggests there is profit in selling “small volumes of hard to find items". Niche products e.g. independent films have an enormous untapped audience which can now be reached digitally through Web 2.0. As a business model Amazon is a good example of this and can also apply to social networks and viral marketing.

Michael Wesch: describes YouTube as a cultural phenomenon and explores how peer-to-peer sharing has transformed media consumption but also identity and self-identity. He is interested in ‘digital ethnography’, the study of the effect of new media on human interaction. See ‘Web 2.0…The Machine is Using Us’.

Henry Jenkins: disputes a dominant reading (see Stuart Hall) that internet communication has reduced social skills by stating that instead, through interacting with media production and consumption through Web 2.0 users develop more skills through active participation and multiple communications and as result are more media literate. In his book, Convergence Culture Jenkins looks at how the convergence of media forms should be understood less in terms of technology and more in terms of what people are doing with them. This can be cross referenced with Gauntlett’s theory that the media effects debate is less relevant now and younger media consumers and much more active and media literate and are less likely to be victims of passive consumption. Online media presents two distinct arguments in this regard.

David Buckingham: is interested in the use of technology in everyday life, access to this technology and the consequences for individuals and social groups. One of Buckingham’s areas of concern is children and media access and use, particularly in terms of identity – internet identity through online media consumption is an ideal opportunity for students to discuss their own examples and experiences.

Martin Barker: explores the notion and that online digital media and its effects is the new moral panic (this argument can be used in conjunction with Jenkins and Gauntlett).

Clay Shirky: theories work well in conjunction with Chris Anderson – he writes on the social and economic effects of internet technologies and is a proponent of crowdsourcing and online collaboration. He argues all forms of media are migrating online.

Baudrillard(1983) links postmodernism with globalization- reality has been replaced by a “media-generated, hyper-reality". Consumption here is seen to play the critical role in defining peoples’ identities and consciousness, superseding the old class-consciousness

Del Sol Poole (1977)- Utopian perspective of NDM. Suggests new media will facilitate a positive media world

A wider range of media texts can be produced that meet the needs of many more groups in society. Provides individual citizens with the capacity to produce/publicise texts themselves. This facilitates the growth of different media representations.

Habermas (1991) Argues that media texts should provide a space for citizens to debate and criticise government actions & form public opinion.

Suggests new media outlets produce similar sorts of representations that focus primarily on celebrity and trivia. New media has created a dumbing down culture.

A student doing a case study on national identity and news could choose a major national event, such as the:

• The fatal attack on the soldier Lee Rigby in London
• The fire fighters' strike
• The Syrian crisis in the wake of a chemical weapons attacks or the peace talks
• Edward Snowden’s leaks on US spying practices
• Same-sex marriage becoming legal in England and Wales
• The fear of Romanian immigrants 'flooding' to the UK in January 2014

• BBC news coverage at the time
• YouTube citizen journalist video
• Analysis of the events by an alternative news website in the week following the story
• A non British news source's coverage
  

• What national identity or identities are being constructed?
• What ideas and values do the identities communicate?
• What is the role of mainstream and alternative media?
• What is the role of the audience? How could audiences and different audiences use and respond to the different products?
• What is the impact of social media and user generated content?
• How and why are collective identities formed?
• Are the products and identities similar or different, why? Does one national identity dominate or are there diverse or contradictory identities? Why is this, considering, for example, producers, production, aims and audiences?
• How do the national identities reflect and reinforce power in society?

Identity

1. Mainstream media is a powerful influence on the construction of an individual’s identity. Use your case study to explore the impact of the media in the construction of identities.
2. ‘We are defined by the media we use.’ How does your case study suggest audiences use the media to construct their own identity?
3. ‘Social media has only served to reinforce existing values and ideologies’. Does your case study suggest social media has played a positive or negative role in the construction of identities?
4. ‘The variety of media available encourages us to create many different identities for ourselves’. How far do you agree with this statement?
5. How are constructions of identity used by media producers and why are they so popular?
6. Audiences are now too sophisticated to be taken in by negative and stereotypical constructions of identity. Do you agree?
7. There are a wide range of constructions of identity in the media and audiences are free to choose how they interpret them. Do you agree?
8. How and why do alternative constructions of identity challenge mainstream values and ideology?

New digital Media

1. The world first heard about the resignation of Jeremy Clarkson from the Twitter.
2. How has new/digital media changed the ways in which information reaches audiences and what are the implications
3. “New and digital media offers media producers different ways of reaching audiences". Consider how and why media producers are using these techniques.
4. ‘New and digital media erodes the dividing line between reporters and reported, between active producers and passive audiences: people are enabled to speak for themselves.’ (www.indymedia.org.uk)
5. Have such developments made the media more democratic, with more equal participation by more people
6. Although new and digital media may promise audiences more freedom, it does not necessarily give them more power. Discuss.
7. New and digital media is creating one global culture. Do you think that this is true?