1. WE
MEDIA
&
DEMOCRACY
Name:
Class:
G325 Section B
Worth 50 marks (50% of exam)
You should spend approximately 1 hour answering this section
There are six different topic areas. You will have a choice of 2 questions for each.
We will be focusing on the topic area ‘We Media and Democracy’.
‘We Media’ and Democracy

2. What are ‘We Media’?
Where / how has ‘We Media’ emerged?
In what way are the contemporary media more democratic than before?
In what ways are the contemporary media less democratic than before?
Section A, question (b)
Candidates might explore combinations of any two media in relation to the above prompts. Starting
from Gillmoor’s definition, all media that are ‘homegrown’, local, organic and potentially countercultural can be studied for this topic, as long as two media (eg web-logging and digital film
uploading and sharing) are studied.
Case Studies
•
Citizen Journalism
•
Films (predominantly documentaries)
•
Social Networking
•
Reality TV
•
Fandom
An Introduction to Democracy
The issue with Democracy is that it is very debatable in terms of what it exactly means and what it
should entitle us as citizens too.
For the purpose of this unit, it is best to adopt a somewhat critical perspective towards democracyto understand that as citizens we have very little ‘real’ input into what the government does.
Noam Chomsky
Argues that the public havevery little access to whatshould be public information- essentially, that
we have a‘Spectator’ Democracy.
Further argues that thereis an elitist media system that helps for thissystem to prevail- often
throughpropaganda
How does this relate to Media?
‘It’s all about power, of course. In the end’

3. - Roger Silverstone
Power Shift?

Think of at least 2 examples of why audiences have become more powerful and/or
producers have become less powerful? A good starting point is to think about your Media
Studies coursework.
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4. The Rise of the camera-phone
Everywhere you go these days, there are people with camera-phones – many of us record,
document, and upload the minutae of our lives. But, ultimately, should we be doing it just because
we can?
Stuart JeffriesThe Guardian, Friday 8 January 2010
There are three people standing in front of a glass case in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Each of
us is trying to get a good view of the so-called Becket Casket. As you know, it was made in Limoges
in the 12th century and depicts one of the most infamous events in English history, the murder of
Archbishop Thomas Becket. It is one of the most lovely things you can hope to see on a bleak
January morning.
Only one problem. The bloke in the middle is hogging the full-frontal position, clearly the best view
to savour Becket's martyrdom. He has been there for five minutes now – not, so far as I can judge,
appreciating the boldly engraved figures against a brilliant blue background, but meaninglessly,
endlessly, exasperatingly snapping the same view. He has that dead-eyed, mouth-gaping,
eminently slappable face we all have when we hold our camera phones a foot in front of our faces
and click, click, click.
Unable to see the casket properly, I reflect sourly on what the great German philosopher Herbert
Marcuse wrote about how instrumental rationality undermines the emancipatory possibilities of
technology, reducing it to a tool for our domination. What I think he meant by this was that instead
of using technology such as camera phones to make our lives richer, freer and happier, we stand like
lumps doing something socially irritating and existentially pointless, thereby ruining the view for
everyone else. We have become snappers on autopilot, slaves to our machines, clogging up
cyberspace with billions of images that nobody in their right minds – not even the person who sent
them – thinks are worthwhile. Or maybe I'm wrong.
Seven years ago, the camera-phone hardly registered. Indeed, on 17 June 2003, some idiot wrote in
the Guardian that the low take-up of those newfangled 3G phones with their built-in cameras,

5. launched two months previously, could be ascribed to the fact that "it's not immediately clear what
they're for, and that mystery is not sufficiently seductive to make many of us shell out". The writer
all but argued that camera-phones were destined for the technological knacker's yard, like Sinclair
C5s, the Securi-Gnome and NiteMates slippers with their built-in headlights (all real products). With
the benefit of hindsight, let me admit what a bonehead I was to write that.
These days, the very idea of a mobile without camera or video facility seems absurd. They're more
portable than most digital cameras and, more importantly, offer faster connection with the
internet, which is a key consideration in this age of virtual presenteeism. So if you're Jonathan Ross
and think your Twitter followers would like to see your photos of you playing in the snow with the
kids, you can post them online before you've even cleared your desk at the BBC. The seemingly
expendable has become the utterly essential. Such, quite often, is the appliance of science.
The latest figures from the Mobile Data Association show that the number of MMS (or video and
picture messages) is rising fast: 336m were sent in the UK in 2006, 553m in 2008, and, when the
MDA publishes its UK Mobile Trends report next month, another large rise is expected for 2009.
True, the number of video and picture messages hardly compares with the number of texts sent
(78.9bn text messages were sent in the UK in 2008), but the MDA argues that, "while SMS [texting]
is used or conversational activity, MMS is much more 'event' driven." Hence the yuletide and New
Year's Eve spikes in picture messaging: on Christmas Day 2008, 4.4m picture messages were sent –
3,000 every minute. The safe money says many more were sent over Christmas 2009, and that there
will have been another huge surge in UK picture messaging thanks to all the snow.
So what are all these images we are sending? The majority are, frankly, worthless, and often taken
in socially unacceptable circumstances. During Peter and the Wolf at London's Royal Festival Hall
last week, I watched parents (who had been instructed to turn off their phones before the show
began) photograph their kids against a backdrop of the Philharmonia Orchestra and a big screen of
the animated film. Why? "Just to prove we're here, to record it for our son when he grows up," said
the woman next to me and my daughter on row NN, who was one of the parents taking the
pictures.
At a Lily Allen gig, a colleague found she was one of the few in the audience not holding her cameraphone above her head to shoot pictures or make films that could be illicitly uploaded online.
Meanwhile, at the London Aquarium, a friend's family excursion was all-but ruined by guppy-like
adult snappers blocking the view of slightly less gormless, gaping fish. How many pictures of fish in
tanks do we, as a society, really need?
When another friend visited the TajMahal recently, he noticed how few people, on arriving, actually
looked at the building with their naked eyes. Instead, they would lift their phones immediately to
capture an image that everybody in the world has already seen a million times. And a recent letter to
the Telegraph complained about how the solemnity of a christening was destroyed by a godmother
elbowing the vicar aside to get shots of the baby at the font.
Back in Room 8 of the V&A, one of us cracks. "Will you bloody stop taking pictures!" shouts the
woman to the man's right. "You're ruining it for everyone. Let someone else have a look for five
seconds, please!" She's wearing a tweed cape, a solidly set hairdo and a forbidding expression that
seems to say 'I'm on a day trip from the home counties and I'm not having this'. The man, who may
have too little English to reply, skulks off towards Room 9.
Minutes later, I find him in front of the Soissons Diptych, snapping away again, oblivious to the hard
stares and tutting from those in less favoured positions. I wander up and say: "That's going to be a

6. rubbish picture, mate." He barely stops photographing to offer me this reply: "Yeah? This is a 10megapixel Samsung SCH-B600, actually, so the photos are going to be pretty excellent. Thanks
very much."
It turns out the man does have good English (he's from Manchester). And lines in sarcasm. He's a
fan of gothic art and architecture, and plans to set up a Flickr photo stream as well as beautifying his
Facebook page with some of the best shots from his trip. He has already emailed a picture of the
Limoges Casket to prove that he was, on 3 January 2010 at 11.15am, standing in front of it. He plans
to tweet some shots later, too.
Another great thinker, the Leeds-based sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, wrote in his book Liquid Love
that, in a modern world in which those purportedly fixed and durable ties of family, class, religion,
marriage have melted away, we look for something else to hold us together. Hence, no doubt, the
rise of social networking sites – and hence, too, the feverish snapping with camera-phones to take
images that can validate our existence to our Twitter followers, our speed-dial intimates, our online
"friends". It's a new Cartesian cogito: I photograph, therefore I am (and don't my uploaded images
glam up my Facebook profile a treat?). Maybe Marcuse was wrong: we're not so much in thrall to
technology, as using it for an unanticipated emancipatory project.
In that context it's not enough to moan, as Telegraph columnist Nigel Farndale did recently, that
"photography, once a noble art, has become, thanks to the move to digital, a mental illness" Riffing
on the verse of Welsh poet WH Davies, Farndale wrote: "What is this life if, full of care, we have no
time to stand and stare. Click. No time to stand beneath the boughs – click, click – and stare as long
as sheep or cows. Click, click, bloody click."
But moaning isn't enough. We also have to wonder what happens to us when technology
increasingly gives us our windows on the world. One thought is that the camera-phone changes our
experience of the world for good rather than evil. It can even be a tool against capitalism. Billy
Bragg, the politically engaged musician, has been on the receiving ends of the click, click, bloody
click of the camera-phone a great deal when playing gigs recently. And, counterintuitively, he loves
it.
"I've had to tell bouncers not to stop people taking pictures of me when I'm playing," Bragg tells me.
"You have to like it because people who take the photos or make the films with their cameraphones are not thinking you're a pranny. They're doing it because they like you, so there's no point
getting upset." It's an interesting corrective to those musicians, such as Boy George, who have
tweeted their pleas to audiences to leave their camera-phones at home and watch the show. At last
November's 250-gig London jazz festival ushers tried to curb the increasing number of fans using
camera-phones to record performances. But, as our jazz critic John Fordham noted at the time, this
clampdown stopped his favourite music reaching a wider online audience.
One reason the rise of the camera-phone appeals to Bragg is that it gives him free publicity. It's
transgressive technology that helps Bragg and his fans stick it to the Man. "In the past, I've spent
thousands of pounds making videos that MTV wouldn't show. Now what happens is that some kid
will put a film they've made of me playing live on YouTube and it can have 20,000 or so hits. What is
happening is that you're being promoted."
Recently, Bragg was doing a soundcheck in Toronto and decided to have a go at fitting the words of
John Cooper Clarke's Evidently Chickentown to the tune of Dylan's Desolation Row. It worked so
well he played it at a late-night gig. "Somebody filmed it and now it's on YouTube. I thought that
was brilliant."

7. But clearly there are downsides to camera-phones, too – the plague of "upskirting" photos being
posted on the web, for example, or Heat magazine encouraging its readers to pap stars in the street
and send the photos to the magazine. Aren't these terrible things facilitated by camera-phone
technology?
"I'm not sure privacy is all that important an issue when it comes to people who are famous and are
seeking attention," says Bragg. Anyway, he argues, camera-phones have more serious uses.
"Thanks in part to camera-phones, we're all reporters now. And that idea is going to have some
pretty radical consequences, especially for police officers. Think about it: only an idiot goes to a
demonstration without a camera or a camera-phone nowadays." He cites the Guardian
investigation into the death of Ian Tomlinson, a passer-by at the G20 protests in London last year,
who was shown to have been beaten to the ground by police by means of films made by
demonstrators' mobile phones.
Today, grainy camera-phone images or films demonstrate the virile realness of a news event. We
expect them to show that a story was so hot it took place before TV crews and the rest of the old
media got there. Hence the wannabe Christmas Day pants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutalib was
immortalised in blurry phone images taken as the plane descended into Detroit.
Media commentator and professor of interactive journalism Jeff Jarvis writes: "We are in the era of
news served raw. Witnesses to any event can now capture and share what they see not just with
acquaintances but with the world, and without the filter and delay of news media. And that doesn't
mean just cell-phone snapshots of bombings or surreptitious footage of closed events. We also have
access to the guts of news – original documents, full transcripts, unedited video. Life is on the
record."
The truth of this analysis was dramatised by the unauthorised images of Saddam Hussein's
execution on 30 December 2006, taken by a security guard on his mobile. His grisly footage of the
event spread through the internet, subverting the official version. In her paper, The Global and the
Mobile: Camera Phone Witnessing in a Age of Terror, social media expert Dr Anna Reading of
London's South Bank University argues that the footage "took away the pretence of civility that
some tried to place around the act". Instead, it revealed that he was put to death during an unruly
spectacle in which onlookers taunted Hussein by yelling, "Go to hell" and chanting "Muqtada,
Muqtadaa, Muqtada" (a reference to Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite Muslim cleric).
Reading also argues that camera phones lets the world into places from which we would hitherto
have been excluded. When the white comedian and former Seinfeld star Michael Richards rounded
on two black hecklers at a 2006 comedy gig in Los Angeles with racist abuse, his rant was captured
by a member of the audience on their camera phone and broadcast on the internet, arguably
ruining Richards' career.
Consider one significant contrast between the 9/11 bombings in the US (2001) and the 7/7 bombings
in London (2005). Arguably, what connected us most poignantly with the former were the phone
calls from the doomed passengers aboard Flight 93 to their loved ones, while four years later, what
made us empathise most with the ordinary victims was the self-portrait of Adam Stacey escaping
from a bombed tube train on the Piccadilly Line that the civil servant took with his phone. Imagine
how different our perception of 9/11 would have been if the soon-to-die had emailed their last
camera-phone images from the twin towers.

8. What interests Reading is how camera-phone technology can link people across borders. "It is not
so much what the images capture indexically, but their iconic status in reminding us of our
complicity in a war declared against global 'terror', rather than a nation state. Stacey's cameraphone image escaping from the London bombings was everyman with a mobile phone."
Arguably, the camera-phone first took on this raw witnessing role on Boxing Day 2004, when the
tsunami struck in the Indian Ocean, killing nearly 230,000 people in 14 countries. Media outlets
relied on footage from people on the spot, many of whom were using camera-phones. And last
year, they were used to bear witness to government crackdowns in Teheran against those
protesting against alleged fraud in June's presidential election.
In itself, the camera-phone changes nothing. The Standard 8mm colour home movie that Abraham
Zapruder took in Dallas on 22 November 1963, which represents the most complete film of the
murder of President John F Kennedy, is akin to the footage the unnamed security guard took of
Saddam's execution. Both are short, grisly films showing the killing of an important public figure
that have gone on to have immense political significance. But there are two big differences.
First, the camera phone is tiny, and thus relatively easy to slip into situations where authorities want
to stop unofficial images or films of an event being taken. Second, and much more importantly, the
images and films we take with them can be spread around the world in seconds. Our experiences
can now travel freely across borders. Admittedly, most of them won't be worth sending in the first
place, but that doesn't mean they won't get sent.
"It's absurd to argue that technology always changes things for the better," says Billy Bragg.
"Clearly it doesn't. But at best the camera-phone is subversive in the way it's being used. We
shouldn't be frightened of it. We should welcome it."

9. The History of the Internet
Using Wikipedia, find the date and offer a very brief description of the following groundbreaking
internet phenomenons.
1. The First Cyber Café
Year:______
2. The First Browser
Year:______
3. The First (Typographical) Smiley
Year:______
4. The First Search Engine
Year:______
5. The First Webcam
Year:______
6. The First Item Sold on EBAY
Year:______
7. The First Wikipedia Entry
Year:______
8. The First Youtube Video
Year:______

10. Pass notes: The internet
From The Guardian, Friday 23 October 2009 [edited]
Age: 40.
Appearance: Flat, rectangular; dimensions vary.
What is it? An unquantifiable ocean of free-flowing data; a boundless virtual universe that in many
respects closely mirrors our own world.
What is it really? A bunch of computers hooked together.
So the web is 40 years old. How time flies. Wrong. The world wide web is only 20. The internet is
40.
What's the difference? The internet is the software and hardware architecture that enables the
world's computers to be connected. The web is an application that runs on the internet, a way of
linking and accessing documents through a browser.
I'm proud to say the distinction means nothing to me. What actual thing happened 40 years
ago? Some boffins working for the US Department of Defence's Advanced Research Projects
Agency (Arpa) sent the first message over a link between two host computers, one at UCLA and one
at Stanford.
And thus the internet was born? Not quite. The term "internet" first appeared in 1974, referring to
networks using the TCP/IP protocol suite.
What about email, then? Is email the internet? Technically, email predates the internet; it started
in 1965 as a form of communication for computer users who were timesharing on the same
mainframe.
So when you say the internet is 40, you don't really mean anything by that? A fair point – it's just
as likely that the internet as we will come to know it hasn't even been born yet.
That doesn't make any sense either. I know. To be honest, I'm not really the person to ask about
this sort of thing. You should get someone from IT to explain it you.

11. The Virtual Revolution
1. Why was the web set up?
2. Why is Wikipedia the ultimate example of a levelling?
3. What was The Well and how was it a pre-cursor to the World Wide Web?
4. Comment on the example of Ushahidi.

12. 5. Why was the web as set up by Tim Berners-Lee perceived as being antiauthoritarian?
6. Comment on the example of Napster. How is it indicative of a wider trend about the
internet and the music and film industries?
7. Why has the internet seen as a positive for an artist like Master Shortie?
8. How and why is the open-ness of the web been affected in recent years?