Marxism and Pluralism

Developments in new/digital media mean that audiences can now have access to a greater variety of views and values.  To what extent are audiences empowered by these developments?

I believe audiences are both empowered and disimpowered.
One way in which audiences are empowered is due to the many media platforms us audiences now have access to. This in turn then gives us many different ways of voicing our opinions and thoughts on different subjects within the news. One way in which is done so is through blogs. With writing blogs people can express their views about different things within the media, this may gain knowledge from people on the internet. Another way is through the social networking in which you can now tweet or make a status in which you can give your opinions again. Also within social networking such as Twitter you can look at many different stories of things which have been mentioned in the news, which may mean different sides of the argument. Within these articles such as the ones on the guardian there are comment sections where you can also give your point of view on certain topics in which this is very popular on the guardian.

Another way in which we are empowered is due things such as citizen journalism and the advanced technology we have at our hands. With citizen journalism this is when just normal people can make the news in ways such as if there is an incident which as occurred they may be at the scene of the incident and could then record what has happened. News broadcasters such as the BBC may not have got to the incident in time so these citizen journalists could then report first hand news from their camera phones for e.g. There have been cases in which this has been backed where someone saw someone shoot another person in which the person who got shot by a policeman was supposedly innocent. This was seen by someone who recorded it and the policeman was reprimanded. This was different to an event which occurred before in that a similar situation happened before in which a policeman got away with a similar case but this was before camera phones were used commonly.   

One way in which audiences are disempowered is that comments can be regulated and censored and if they are tagged as inappropriate they can get taken down. This may be seen as an illusion as it may make us believe that we have power due to the numerous platform accesses however the elite still have the power such as Google and social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Another example in which we are disempowered is Spotify. Spotify has also created an illusion in where we believed we were signing up to free membership but now we have to pay for the membership and it is way of keeping the elite seperate from the rest of us.