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Dotmocracy: Crowdsourcing, Mashups, and Social Change

As San Francisco braces itself to be the first major American city to not have a daily newspaper, the canary has sung as the death of print looks eminent. But what new frontiers do new media really offer? Can media democracy be maintained through new forms of citizen media that are more interactive featuring user-generated content?

Now almost anyone can be a media maker, and the whole world is literally watching, recording and listening. The divide between the producer and consumer has begun to dissolve. Crowdsourcing means that news can be created from the people experiencing the situations directly. Instead of producing content in house, aggregated content is the new king, with a whole flood of users openly sharing their photography, writing, and art. 

Dotmocracy is an established facilitation method for collecting and prioritizing ideas among a large number of people. It is an equal opportunity & participatory group decision-making process. Participants write down ideas and apply dots under each idea to show which ones they prefer. The final result is a graph-like visual representation of the groups collective preferences.

Through breakthroughs in Web 2.0 technology a new form of digital democracy has emerged where the divide between media producers and consumers has dissolved and citizen media rules. In this new age of participatory media is transforming the central tenants which make up our democracy, opening up new channels for citizen participation.  While before citizens had to rally for mainstream media attention to catch the ears of politicians, now it is easier ever than before for citizens to launch awareness campaigns and get their message heard by the masses.  Even more importantly, new advances in digital publishing mean that we now have advance systems of filtering and prioritizing data collectively. Instead of the corporations deciding what is important for us to view, it is the power of the crowd that fuels and filters digital content. Online users can choose what news they want to receive through RSS feeds, and can easily forward newsworthy items onto their friends and share them over social networks.

Dotmocracy: Crowdsourcing, Mashups, and Social Change (pdf)
Source: Dotmocraty

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