Conclusion

Evidently, one must be wary of the tendency to be swept up in the exciting and optimistic potentials of participatory culture, without fully appreciating its limits. New media forms that invite audience involvement into the media production process, clearly have a strong potential to dislocate the previously held ‘top-down’ power paradigms of traditional mass media. Yet the example of blogs, shows how this positive impact can be offset by the introduction of new restrictive forces on the public sphere. Specifically, this essay focuses on the establishment of additional forms of control, as illustrated by the blogosphere. The importance of acknowledging these less positive impacts on the public sphere is that they are very real problems, that can potentially suppress many of the developments described of new media. Yet it is equally as important, as Jenkins notes – to focus not only on what the media is doing to us, as consumers, but to also focus on what we are doing with media (2006). As history supports, reform of the media system gains momentum “at a time when people are starting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest” (Jenkins, 2006: 248). Therefore, while it is critical to accept the aforementioned limits of new media, the invaluable opportunities presented by new media must be pursued whilst they exist.