10+1 remarks on participation & the media (guest blog)

We all love public participation in media don’t we? From Dan Gillmor’s ‘We The Media’ to Clay Shirky’s ‘Here Come’s Everybody’ via Wikipedia and the Guardian’s Open Journalism, it’s been seen as a lovely thing for both the industry and the citizen. I call my version of it Networked Journalism. But is it really working? Have we over-expected? Do we (the professional) really embrace sharing? Pilar Carrera is a media lecturer at Madrid’s Universidad Carlos III studying participatory journalism who is currently a visiting fellow at my Department at the LSE. Here is her (tongue-in-cheek) set of questions we should ask ourselves about the “hype-Internet fueled unidirectional mass media trauma” we call ‘PARTICIPATION’. Apocalyptic or utopian or just “nothing new under the sun”?