The economics of choice

In the Economist article, "Among the Audience," the writer states: "What is new is that young people today, and most people in the future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not." The piece goes on to say that sometimes there will be help from human editors and new filtering and collaboration technologies. That seems to be where we're headed, especially with Twitter, etc., but the question still remains, to what end?

It seems that nearly every discussion of the future of media is packed with proclamations and predictions about what people will be doing in the future, but rarely do we hear in those discussions attempts at assessing why anyone will be doing new fad x, y or z.

Similarly, David Gauntlett, in his article, "Media Studies 2.0," states that the "emergent alternative" to the traditional approach will in part be characterized by the replacement of the "fetishised expert" with a "focus on everday meanings," or content produced by audience members interested in new qualitative research techniques.

There is an assumption here that the audience brings with it a sense of "everydayness" which is difficult to prove. The audience can bring with it many things—expertise, ignorance, varying degrees of truth—but just because they are not professional content producers does not imply that they are somehow more real than paid journalists. We need to ask ourselves why an audience wants to participate rather than adjust and encourage participation without understanding motives.