Page 47 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 2. Literature review

ism’s next wave, and argued that, with the peer-to-peer dissemination form and the two

properties of ‘share’ and ‘link’, media services such as the blog cultivated an enormous
amount of grassroots publishing (Gillmor, 2004). Since then, the writing and editing
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of news no longer has to follow the 5W1H principle; instead, it has changed to a form
where the story is presented with its original ‘taste and flavour’ (Bowman and Willis,
2003). More significantly, audiences do not have to be passive receivers who only take

a unidirectional approach to news consumption. They become active disseminators in a
way that marks the transfer of mainstream media to the model of user communication
in news transmission.

At the end of 2002, Gillmor formally proposed the concept of We Media in his
article News for the next generation: here comes We Media, published in the journal
Columbia Journalism Review. He pointed out that, due to the booming social media
services mediated by information and communication technology, users who favour
technology can no longer bear to be passive audiences, and therefore they try to partic-

ipate in interaction with news information. They become a vital and influential part in
the circle of news dissemination, which makes them the future mainstream media.
Supporting Gillmor’s view, the Media Centre of the American Press Institute

published a research report on We Media co-proposed by Shayne Bowman and Chris
Willis. They commissioned ‘We Media as a way to begin to understand how ordinary
citizens, empowered by digital technologies that connect knowledge throughout the
globe, are contributing to and participating in their own truths, their own kind of news’
(Bowman and Willis, 2003, p.5). In short, it refers to the kind of media channel that

enables citizens to publish what they see and what they hear. Such channels include on-
line communities on blogs, microblogs, WeChat, and BBS/ forums.
To further describe the content and the intent of online communication that often

occurs in collaborative and social media, Bowman and Willis (2003) used the term
‘participatory journalism’, which they defined as:
‘the act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of
collecting, reporting, analysing and disseminating news and information. The in-

5 ‘5W1H’ refers to who, why, what, when, where, how.

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