Democracy of new media.
Sunday, September 27, 2009 by semi
In the early years, Web surfing meant going from site to site and reading what was on each page. Today's Web users are much more active. They add content, interact with others, and personalize sites. Site owners are making websites more flexible while encouraging users to participate.
Web surfing was mostly passive. Users read pages and followed links. In this model, the site owner was in charge, and visitors took what was offered. Interaction was limited to simple chartrooms and forums. Adding to the problems were slow connection speeds which made it hard to upload content. In the early 2000s, that model started changing. With faster connection speeds users could easily upload content. Users, instead of site owners were becoming a site's most important members.
The more active users become the more democratic the Web is. Sites like “YouTube”, for videos, and “Flickr”, for photos-are built with user-added content. Millions of people write their own blogs. On"wiki"sites, such as “Wikipedia”, members add, change, and delete information and on social networking sites like “MySpace” and “Face book”, people meet and build new communities. Then there are sites like “Reddit” which collect links to online articles. They let user’s vote- getters rising to the top. Now that's democracy in action.
As people's expectations of the Internet have changed, the sites are becoming more interactive. For example, people can change “My Yahoo” page to make it look the way they want. Stores like Amazon encourage people to write product reviews. News sites like CNN run polls asking for people's opinions. All these sites go out of their way to place the user at the centre.
Web surfing was mostly passive. Users read pages and followed links. In this model, the site owner was in charge, and visitors took what was offered. Interaction was limited to simple chartrooms and forums. Adding to the problems were slow connection speeds which made it hard to upload content. In the early 2000s, that model started changing. With faster connection speeds users could easily upload content. Users, instead of site owners were becoming a site's most important members.
The more active users become the more democratic the Web is. Sites like “YouTube”, for videos, and “Flickr”, for photos-are built with user-added content. Millions of people write their own blogs. On"wiki"sites, such as “Wikipedia”, members add, change, and delete information and on social networking sites like “MySpace” and “Face book”, people meet and build new communities. Then there are sites like “Reddit” which collect links to online articles. They let user’s vote- getters rising to the top. Now that's democracy in action.
As people's expectations of the Internet have changed, the sites are becoming more interactive. For example, people can change “My Yahoo” page to make it look the way they want. Stores like Amazon encourage people to write product reviews. News sites like CNN run polls asking for people's opinions. All these sites go out of their way to place the user at the centre.