As San Francisco braces itself to be the first major American city to not have a daily newspaper, the canary has sung as the death of print looks eminent. But what new frontiers do new media really offer? Can media democracy be maintained through new forms of citizen media that are more interactive featuring user-generated content?

Now almost anyone can be a media maker, and the whole world is literally watching, recording and listening. The divide between the producer and consumer has begun to dissolve. Crowdsourcing means that news can be created from the people experiencing the situations directly. Instead of producing content in house, aggregated content is the new king, with a whole flood of users openly sharing their photography, writing, and art.

Due to this influx of citizen media content, consumers are increasingly reluctant to pay for corporate media content, including the news. Citizens are turning towards each other for their news, as they send everything from reports on violence in Gaza, to updates on local public transit through text messages (sms), blog posts, and online videos about both local and global events. This eBook will explore everything from the commonalities between popular education and Open Source software; how raves and hip hop effect how we collect and visualize data; and how the participatory, open nature of new media technology have infected our world’s politics.

With citizens picking up cameras and mobile phones, and the old media slowly going bankrupt, there will be a critical disruption in our traditional media landscape. By capturing the essence of a new generation of new media technology, this eBook aims to sketch out these emerging forms of communication are transforming the media  as we know it. In the spirit of crowdsourcing I open my essay up open source for edits. Available for download for free, I encourage you to send me your comments, edits, rants, disagreements, praise, and all other feedback to lisa@mobilerevolutions.org, and feel free to remix! I hope people will send me copies of their new versions, and I look forward to your feedback.

Through breakthroughs in Web 2.0 technology a new form of digital democracy has emerged where the divide between media producers and consumers dissolved and citizen media rules. While before citizens had to rally for mainstream media attention to catch the ears of politicians, now it is easier ever than before for citizens to launch awareness campaigns and get their message heard by the masses. Even more importantly, new advances in digital publishing mean that we now have advance systems of filtering and prioritizing data collectively. A new passion economy has emerged, that has put news production and distribution back in the hands of the people. Sites like Wikipedia put citizens in charge of fact checking and knowledge production. Online users can choose what news they want to receive through RSS feeds, and can easily forward newsworthy items onto their friends and share them over social networks like Facebook. While media conglomerates have long monopolized media production into an industry, online culture has reclaimed the news media in such a way that everyone’s voice counts, and the potential for wide scale participation and collaboration is greater than ever. The old feminist adage, “the personal is political” rings true, as online communication means that even what you’re having for breakfast can be newsworthy. Yet has this proliferation of online media been accompanied an influx of garbage and spam? How do we sort through all the voices, let alone know that they are credible sources? What does the increase in citizen produced media mean to the profession of journalism, and what are the possible limitations of de-professionalizing news? Does more voices necessarily mean more democracy? This eBook will answer these questions and more, specifically exploring how online culture has changed the face of the news and democracy.

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