Intro:
Due to the development of technology and the advancement of humans’ adaptability,
audiences of news and media are now able to construct their own news as well as circulate
and distribute them across the online platform.
Paragraph One: Construction of News and Clay Shirky’s End of Audience Theory
The grant of digital access to news sources and equipment have enabled audiences to
construct their own news and develop their own web pages and online articles. Media has
become a cost-effective, not to mention globally available, infrastructural tool for audiences
to distribute their news. The people who are producing news, who are not employees or
professionals of the media industry but rather amateur producers, now have the ability to
share their work with a potential in reaching a global audience. This was considered
practically impossible before the development of technology. In accordance with Clay
Shirky’s End of Audience Theory, overtime, the digital platform has positioned audiences
from acting as simply a consumer of content to participating actively in the process of
producing and distributing media content. He refers to these people as ‘prosumers’. It can be
said that the easy manipulability of digital files is what encouraged and enabled prosumers
to produce news, through the modification and adaptation of the digital content. And, in
addition to being able to construct news, prosumer roles also allows an expansion of news
circulation. This is because there are now more varieties of the same news story with
different perspectives and editing styles presented on the online platform. As a result of this
phenomenon, a number of user-generated content have emerged and overshadowed official
online news sources.
Paragraph Two: Circulation and Distribution of News
The online presence provided by social media has the likeliness of expanding user content
and providing them exposure. The benefit of social media is that it not only allows
audiences, or prosumers, to share posts but the lack of quality also allows them to produce
posts in a short amount of time, and often it can be done in an instant click. This content is
able to be directly and precisely targeted to the prosumer’s choice of audience group, which
could be achieved through hashtags or advertisement. Online news has the advantage of
quick dissemination through comments on social media posts and share buttons that can
link websites and posts to other social medias, such as Instagram, Facebook or through
WhatsApp group chats. There are also like buttons, which hold value as if the social media
post has a substantial number of likes, it can reach the front page and thus can be viewed by
even audiences who do not have a constant interest in the news. Not to mention that the
implement of the algorithm can make the advertising more effectively works.
Conclusion:
To conclude, audiences are able to construct, circulate and distribute news through digital
technology. Additionally, Clay Shirky’s theory looks at how media has advanced into a fast
and immediate network which allowed consumers to become prosumers.
Explain the reasons why as to audiences would want to construct news. [10]
Intro:
Due to the development of technology and the advancement of humans’ adaptability,
audiences of news and media are now able to construct their own news. There are many
reasons as to why audiences have evolved from consumers to ‘prosumers’.