In the Age of Media Six Questions about Media and Participation

We are in an age of participatory media, ordinary people are no longer consumers but also producer. Web 2.0 gives us the consumers a chance to have our voices heard by blog's, speak to those in power , share knowledge and connect with people all over the world.
Tim O Reily ( 2001) invented web 2.0 after the web crash but the inventor of the world wide web ( Tim Berners Lee) said the the basic technological infrastructure of web 2.0 is not much different to web 1.0.
The times when cable TV and portable radios came about have been said that these technology changes were to bring people power and eventually undermine the people in power politically or the big corporations.
There is a danger to the type of technology determinism though, even though we have new technology which is having out voices being heard it depends what it is used for, by who? and how it is used.
People who regularly use the web 2.0 are the youth and more usually youth from a wealthy background even the though youth from a less wealthy background are still increasingly found to have computers in their homes it still restricts them too the sophistication of the software they use and therefore wont be able to produce some thing as good as people brought up in middle class. Young people are known to be the ' early adopters' of a new social networking site.It is found that girls are usually the ones to post blog's and boys post videos on YouTube. Next to question is how do these companies from the internet make their money if we as the consumers are becoming producers. Advertising is one of the ways in which a website can make their money, for example when you go on your computer you have cookies which then enable the advertisers to see what your searching on search engine like Google and then advertise those things which someone is searching. Soren Peterson said ' Loser Generated content' which is basically saying we as producers are labouring for the big corporations but for free. We put so much effort into designing a blog to advertise brands like Nike? for example the craze about the Nike trainer ' Blazers.