New Interactive Environments - Task 8

Lüders, M. (2008). Concpeptualising personal media. New Media and Society, 10(5), 683-702.

In her article Conceptualizing personal media, Lüders tries to find distinct differences between mass media and personal media. As she studies previous theories which define mass media, she discovers that there are many similarities between personal and mass media. For example while personal blogs are an example of personal media, they could be read by a large audience - does that make it mass media?

The thoughts which came into my mind were that there are not only personal media and mass media, but also collective media as such. In the chapter Users as Producers, Lüders states that the mass media is being more and more created by the audience. Therefore she categorizes collectively generated media as mass media. In a sense it can be generalized as mass media, but in the other hand, it is a part which is constantly growing to maybe some day be one of the largest of media forms.

While to read from Lüders's image of axes, personal media is more symmetrical and de-centralized and not controlled, mass media is more one way communication and centralized, then where do for example Wikipedia or YouTube or any other collective sharing environment fit?

Collective media is generally co-controlled and not one- or two- way, but multi-way communicated. It does not have a centrum so to say other than the specific environment created online. Users can share their personal thoughts, ideas and works as well as promote businesses, products or even do politics. Popular sharing environments can not be categorized specifically as mass or personal media.

Media today is being constantly collectively created and changed. Mass media can no longer be a one-way great-leader-and-teacher, because people have ability to choose the content of media. There is not only mass media and personal media in my opinion, therefore it is difficult to find the differences between the two. This was also concluded by Lüders, when she said that

"Whereas the point of departure for this article has been a crude distinction between personal media and mass media, the reality is certainly more complex, especially considering the emergence of social and collaborative media situated between

these endpoints."