Brian asked this question on the BBC World Have Your Say, “What kind of barriers is new media breaking? empowering small business, minorities, breaking up elites?”
The primary barrier that citizen journalism is breaking is “don’t speak unless spoken to.”
If you have never explored the Cluetrain Manifesto you really need to. Essentially, the Internet has allowed zero-barrier to instantaneous and pervasive conversation on any topic about anyone (person, place, or thing).
The top-down approach to news, advertising, marketing, promotion, politics, and policy (one-to-many) has been supplanted by the conversation that heretofore was quiet and limited in reach and volume: the conversation happening in the streets, in the auditorium, in front of the television, in the cinema, at the pub, in the schools, and at the shareholders meeting (many-to-many).
And the Internet, the World-Wide-Web, and now the blogosphere (and the blogs, the bloggers, the citizen journalists, the citizen marketers, et al) has not taken voice from the man at the top or given volume to the man on the bottom but rather it has merely leveled the playing field.
One voice has not increased in volume, but the blogosphere is an echo chamber (passion chamber?) and through its tendency to amplify emergent important message, the man on the street has equal potential to be heard at equal volume as the man at the top, which of course includes Main Stream Media, governement officials, and captains of industry.
