I'll Ask the Audience

One of the major shifts that society has experience as a result of increased reliance on social forms of media, is the notion of what constitutes and “expert” and who is qualified to articulate and transmit information. Web-sites that are a result of social construction (such as wikipedia) may not be peer reviewed and may lack the classical qualifications of what we might traditionally consider to be a valid source of information and yet they seem to be used more and more as sources to gather and distribute information. This active participation that allows citizens to contribute over the Internet is a revolutionary change in social engineering. Having a database with millions of contributor’s results in a global collective of shared information. Accuracy of the information is certainly a major concern with social media outlets such as blogs or Wikipedia, but with so many active users patrolling these highly trafficked web pages, fallacies are often addressed or exposed through sheer volume of participants.

Using the Internet, as a global database of information was a benchmark moment in the “information age”, having such a high level of active participation contributing to this global consciousness is an unparalleled social occurrence. An audience that spent their entire lives as passive receivers of media is not active participants without asking for anything in return. Amazing.