Page 46 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

irreversible’ (Chang and Tai, 2003, p.43).

This was in line with Margolis and Resnick’s (2000) argument that, in terms of
democracy, the most powerful influence is its competence in delivering information to
the public in a speedy and efficient manner. Since information represents power, for
people living in states like China, ‘democratisation of information’ (Tai, 2006, p.180)
on the internet has special implications.

Secondly, the internet fosters a new model that supports freer and more effective
interaction between government, media and public. As Tai (2006) indicated:
‘the internet marks a dramatic departure from all previous communication mod-

els: it not only enhances the conventional one-to-many communication but also
fosters brand-new types of communication in which users’ messages can be sent
by a heterogeneous user base to a heterogeneous audience’ (Tai, 2006, p.162).
It facilitated the construction of a relatively flexible communication space shaped
by large numbers of sufficiently motivated groups of people (Feenberg and Bakardjie-

va, 2004).
As the internet evolved and went through its infancy, it started to penetrate every
aspect of people’s ordinary life (Wellman and Haythornthwaite, 2002). Citizens are ex-

periencing a ubiquitousness and ‘banalisation’ of the internet and other related technol-
ogies (Graham, 2004). Consequently, users have developed routines in using the inter-
net to expand the media space, and their expectations have become broader (Lievrouw,
2004). We Media came into being under such circumstance. The following section
introduces this new concept and discusses its forms and characteristics.

2.5.1.1 Definition of We Media

We Media is also known as ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘individual media’, which is a
concept derived from an expert columnist in the IT field in Silicon Valley, Dan Gillmor.

Gillmor put forward the concept of ‘Journalism 3.0’ in his blog in 2001: ‘Journalism 1.0’
was identified as the traditional media or old media; ‘Journalism 2.0’ refers to the cross
media or new media; and ‘Journalism 3.0’ is defined as We Media under the populari-
sation of a blog-like service. Gillmor further identified ‘Journalism 3.0’ to be journal-

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