New And Digital Media Erodes The Dividing Line Between Reporters And Reported, Between Active Producers And Passive Audiences: People Are Enabled To Speak For Themselves.’Have Such Developments Made The Media More Democratic, With More Equal Participation By More People?

Thanks to media today, the people get more equality compared to several years back. A major reason why the equality has increased is down to social networking sites, sites such as Facebook and Twitter allow users to voice their own opinoins, and do as they wish. But in some cases this can be taken too far, for example, in January 2010 a man sent a menacing tweet saying he was going to blow up an airport, he was found guility and taken to court. But afterwards he won his case. The man said he was going to blow up a near by airport as it was closed because of snow. Mr Chambers said he had sent the tweet, which contained swear words, to his 600 followers in a moment of frustration after Robin Hood Airport, near Doncaster, was closed by snow in January 2010. Afterwards he said he never thought anyone would take his 'silly joke' seriously. He was then fined £385. Another example when someone voiced their own opinoin was when a woman in India was arressted for "creating or promoting enmity, hatred or ill-will between classes. Her friend who also liked the comment was also arrested. So from these two examples, it shows that peoples opionoins are heard a lot more compared to years back. Facebook and Twitter pages also allow people to create fan pages, these people tend to be famous people. But on these fan pages users get to host their own opinions on the fan page, these can be both postitive and negative posts. There's also several websites out there such as forums, these allow you to comment on people posts etc. Another main example of this would be YouTube, people can upload their videos and allow people to comment on them. This is again both postivie and negative posts.

The goverment is starting to take control of the internet more and more these days, hence why the everyday persons comment can lead in to something big, like the examples above. But this isn't always the case, for example the Amanda Todd incedent, when peoples hatred were sent to her from thousands of people all over the world. Many sites out their are monitered and the users that post hatred comments are usual band, this goes agains't the democratic side of things, as it doesn't give the users freedom of speech. but back to the point, in this case the internet was monitered towards the amando todd hatred, which caused her situation to get a lot worse. Leading to her commiting suicide .