Page 48 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Feasibility Study of New Media Technology
on Constructing Online Public Sphere

tent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-rang-

ing and relevant information that a democracy requires (ibid, p.9)’.
They pointed out that the new form changed the long-lasting top-down broadcast
model in media communication to a bottom-up intercast model, which constitutes an
evolution in the roles of different parties engaged in news dissemination. Originally
characterised by media organisation control, all news is filtered through an organisation

before getting to the audience. But in the We Media age, since participants are peers
and have the ability to change roles, news is often unfiltered by a mediator before get-
ting to its audience. It is also called the intercast model, in which peer-to-peer and so-

cial network communication represents an equal interaction form.
In the west, the concept of We Media has already been replaced by citizen journal-
ism. However, because it is difficult for citizen journalism to expand, We Media seems
to be easier for people to accept.

2.5.1.2 Characteristics of We Media

From the birth of the blog to the rise of the microblog, everything changed. There
appeared a crack in the iceberg of discourse power, and the right of speech has been ex-
panded to an unprecedented degree. Anyone with a computer and a network connection

is able to produce and publish news, which is the so-called ‘everyone is a journalist’
culture. It signifies speaking opportunities for the silent majority in the virtual world.
However, there are consequences to the bottom-up model when everyone is able to
collect, edit and publish news. While according to Gillmor’s argument in We the Media

(2004), it is undeniable that a majority of people remain consumers, yet their horizons
are broadened at an unprecedented rate and will eventually be balanced from various
perspectives. Therefore, the concept of We Media actually came into being as a grass-
roots revival.

Gillmor (2004) was of the opinion that, in the past 150 years, there have been
two verified forms of media communication: one-to-many (books, newspapers, radio,
television, etc.) and one-to-one (letter, telegraph, telephone, etc.). For the first time, the
internet has realised many-to-many and few-to-few communications, which has greatly

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