Web 2.0 according to Professor Julian McDougall

Media Studies 2.0

Has the digital revolution changed the way we use the media? Can we still talk about ‘New Media’ – or, in an era of converging technologies, is this a redundant concept? Is there such a thing as Web 2.0? And what does it really mean for Media Studies? Dr Julian McDougall offers a wide-ranging overview of the implications of what’s rapidly shaping up to be Media Studies 2.0.

The view of the internet and new digital media as an ‘optional extra’ is replaced with recognition that they have fundamentally changed the ways in which we engage with all media.
Do you ‘watch television’ in the traditional sense any more? Can videogames be ‘taught’? Are there any distinct ‘media institutions’ in the era of convergence? If you can share music on Facebook with your ‘friends’ and they can purchase it (or take it for nowt) online and access the video within a few clicks on YouTube, what does this do to the ‘music industry’ as we know it? And most importantly, is there such a thing as ‘audience’ in this postmodern ‘we media’ age? Blimey!

There will always be a need to learn about media power, influence, access and issues of representation – these are tremendously important aspects of contemporary citizenship. But the way in which these cultural practices are circulated and disseminated is fundamentally changing. Your Media teachers are likely to be thinking about this stuff at the moment, and somewhere down the line that should make a difference to you. Here’s how.

Recently the University of Westminster announced that it would no longer be offering degrees in Media Studies. This is a big deal because Westminster was one of the first places to do so. A bunch of academics who have always derided the subject missed the point – at last they have seen sense and put an end to this easy option – that kind of thing. Why did this miss the point? Because the University will still offer degrees in Media but they will be more specialist. The decision is a response to the idea – put forward by academic theorist David Gauntlett who, coincidentally or not, works at Westminster – that the media is no longer a stable entity that can be taught about or studied coherently in such a broad way. It is too big, too fluid, too complex – too different. What has been the transformative phenomenon? Broadband internet, spawning a host of user-generated material via software and hosted sites – YouTube, MySpace, Facebook – which have been labelled ‘Web 2.0’.

More people, less media

Gauntlett, who coined the ‘Media 2.0’ response (see www.theory.org.uk for the detail), argues that people don’t just get represented by the media any more. Instead, they use Web 2.0 platforms to make their own media, share it with the world and thus represent themselves. So Media Studies needs to engage now with the ways in which people make sense of their identities and then creatively, through the media, express this. This means that Media students need to move away from the ‘Media 1.0’ way of doing things by ‘questioning the traditional approach to people who ‘produce’ media and people who ‘use’ media’ and by ‘exploring people’s contemporary media experiences by encouraging creative responses’ (quotes from Gauntlett: Creative Explorations, 2007).

Media 2.0, then, will be more about people and less about ‘the media’.

Another version of this theme comes from Dan Gillmor’s book, We the Media. Looking specifically at ‘citizen journalism’ in the form of blogs, Gillmor offers a similar assertion to Gauntlett, arguing that Web 2.0 enables ordinary people to participate in politics and news by producing their own accounts of real events and commenting immediately (and loudly) on ‘official’ journalism. Another media academic, John Hartley (2007), describes the shift from a demand-led market of creative industries to a social network market. Describing the ‘long tail’ of media distribution, he suggests that the liberating potential of Web 2.0 might not only be equal to the emergence of ‘mass literacy’ but beyond that be an equivalent to the introduction of mass public schooling! Audience and media research, then, will need to answer questions about what will be enabled by ‘universal digital literacy’ and the ‘we media’ phenomenon – ‘one minute you’re a fan, the next you’re signing autographs’.

Networks not institutions?

Taking these ideas together, we end up thinking of the media more as a range of networks via which the public can decide to participate (or not) in creative, communicative, collaborative and democratic activities, and less as a group of powerful organizations influencing us. Actually we are probably halfway between these two states – or at least the developed world is (don’t forget less than 5% of the world have a broadband connection – a somewhat sobering downside to what is frequently referred to as the ‘global village’). The most popular Web 2.0 sites are owned by huge companies; and so every moment of democratic ’We Media’ social networking makes money for the big corporations – the same ones that were making billions from Web 1.0, in fact. Hitwise (2007) report that 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload video, 0.2% of Flickr visitors upload photos and Wikipedia, gets edited or expanded by 4.59% of users. And so most of us are using the Web 2.0 sites to read, watch, play and listen – but not to create and upload – which is how we were using ’old media’ (whatever ‘using the media’ might mean). For these reasons we might be more sensible to think of where we are now as Web 1.5?

But in ten years time?

Where does this leave you, then, if you are studying A Level Media Studies? Well, you’re in a great position to shape the future of the subject, believe it or not. The new A Level specifications (which will be taught from September this year) all bear witness to convergence and Web 2.0 to some extent (OCR more than the others, it is fair to say); but the ‘old’ specifications all include units where you can debate critical issues and perspectives on the media in society. And here is the important bit – your examiners will be aware of the ‘Media 2.0’ debate and will richly reward students who engage with it in their coursework and exams.

Let’s consider some real life examples of these changes (a paradigm shift, to use the theoretical term).

Playback
Some recent research by Martinez in schools in Barcelona found that playback on YouTube was up there for Catalan students with physical attractions, fashion, sporting prowess and being in a band as a route to high level social capital in school. The research identified three desires on the part of YouTube uploaders in these schools:

• the wish to post for family and friends
• a vague and naive ambition to reach a broader audience
• a fixation on playback, including being actively engaged in seeking specific audiences and tagging with the goal of competing with other students for playback volume and critical comments. Now that YouTube is to pay the providers of popular uploads a percentage of the advertising revenue, this desire for playback will become more mercenary and strategic.

Britney 2.0
The recent plight of Britney Spears offers us another way of thinking about all this. A fairly ‘traditional’ approach for Media Studies at A Level might be for you to evaluate the claim made by Alistair Campbell (previously Tony Blair’s press officer and ‘spin doctor’) that Britney has ceased to be considered a human being by the public and now is understood primarily as a ‘news commodity’. Taking the ‘Media 2.0’ idea further to explore this, how might we distinguish ‘old’ and ‘new’ approaches to this question? Like this, I suggest:

Britney 1.0
News values
Infotainment
Celebrity culture
Gender
Ideology
Media regulation
Deregulation
News agendas
Britney 2.0
Online news
Rolling news
Blogs
YouTube
Lack of regulation
Notions of truth
People responding
People creating

I am not suggesting here that the Britney 1.0 list is replaced by Britney 2.0. Instead, the right-hand list is added to the first column. But it isn’t an optional extra – you cannot make sense of what Alistair Campbell is saying about the ‘fallen icon’ without debating how far her commodification is amplified and accelerated by the online dispersal of her as a ‘sign’.

Fan culture
Matt Hills (2006) analyses fandom as a form of cultural expression. Whilst many of his examples have nothing to do with ‘Web 2.0’ – Trekkies and Elvis impersonators, for example – it is clear that broadband internet can accelerate fan interpretations and re-imaginings of media products – check out the enormous range of ‘mash up’ and ‘sweded’ video material on YouTube. From Harry Potter fans sharing fan literature online to the many commentary edits of the Sopranos finale you can find online, media producers now have to accept that fans can, and will, upload their own versions of material within hours of the official broadcast.
Tardisodes

Partly as a response to the proliferation of Dr Who fan material on the internet, the BBC now offers ‘in between’ narratives in the form of Tardisodes which, like vodcasts, can be accessed through subscription and viewed on a mobile device. Hills describes how these extras are cleverly designed to add to the narrative experience without interrupting the scheduled flow by becoming mandatory. This extended textual experience – where a Dr Who fan can watch the scheduled episode, read magazines, share material on fan sites, download Tardisodes and ‘be’ the Dr on a DS screen – creates a state of ‘hyperdiegesis’ – a great example of postmodern media, if ever you need one!

Club Penguin
A bit like Second Life for kids, Club Penguin is a free-to-join online world where you get to create and then live life as a penguin avatar. Then you can network with other penguins, get a job, take part in a variety of activities, buy things and customize your penguin being. How do we analyse this – as a media text, as a game, as an experience? Do we need new theories to analyse such a media product which observes none of the traditional textual boundaries? Or should Media Studies ignore it and see it only as a piece of software? These are early days for these questions and we hope that you will help us provide some answers!

Recently I have spent some time working on text books, developing a new Media course and writing content for the new OCR A Level and Diploma. What has struck me more than anything along the way is the omnipotence of the internet in every topic, every theme, every bit of the subject. So you realize that you are constantly writing about ‘the impact of convergence and digital technology’ but still doing so as though this is an optional aspect of what is to be learned, or researched – when the sum of all these elements is clearly the realization that this ought to be central, even the starting, point.

But what does it all mean?

Now of course this doesn’t mean that Media students like you don’t still need to look at how texts make meaning – a film or range of films, a TV drama, a magazine or a radio programme. But as more and more people stop using the media in this way, we are likely to see Media Studies shift away from the study of media texts and towards the sociological study of people and their mediated culture. If you go on to study Media at university, this is what you will encounter.

Each of the examples discussed here undermines the Media1.0 approach, and none of them are obscure or untypical. This is the media: fragmented, circular, hyper-diegetic, yet to many people (in the old days known as ‘the audience’), it is an everyday experience, nothing special, the zeitgeist. But how will history judge it? How big a deal will it seem when people look back? Will it have been a phase, where a few of us got over-excited – like the Millennium Bug?!
So what difference does it make? See John Fitzgerald’s piece on The Smiths in MM23 to get this intertextual reference, which is, of course, an example of postmodernism for which you could refer to Richard Smith’s article on the postmodernism of The Mighty Boosh, which itself will lead you to other material. This is actually how postmodernism works in its simplest form – every text links to another until you lose any sense of reality outside of its representation in culture. Anyway, back to the point – how can you become a Media 2.0 student?

Gauntlett argues that the media play a role in the construction of identity, but not that big a role in relation to other aspects of social experience. It is this finding that leads him to suggest that Media Studies has up until now been too interested in ‘The Media’, especially the notion of the self-contained media text, and insufficiently attentive to people and how they give meaning to culture. But we must tread carefully. Taking the Britney analysis as a template, you need to approach media products in an academic way (when looking at existing media) and creative way (when making your own) that combines tried-and-tested concepts like representation with an understanding of how people make sense of media in the online age. Your teachers will help you with this. They might agree with the premise, and show you ways of studying culture and identity in this way – or they might resist Gauntlett’s ideas and tell you that the conceptual framework we already have is robust enough to adapt to these changes, or that the changes aren’t as radical as the Media 2.0 advocates would have us believe. The fact that we can’t predict here what your teachers will say is not a problem. It doesn’t mean the quality of the subject is undermined by a lack of consensus. It actually makes things more interesting. Life is complex; so is culture, and so is Media Studies, or whatever we decide to call it in the future.