CAIRO - There is no theatre without spectators, no film without watchers, no radio without listeners, no TV without viewers, no newspaper without readers. Let the analogy roll on and we will conclude that there is no new media without the digital folk. The latter are, however, a very different and certainly luckier lot. Spectators, watchers, listeners, viewers, readers and audience are more or less ‘receivers' with limited windows and options to express their reactions. Only over the past couple of decades have radio and TV audiences been empowered by technology to air their views and comments, but only in programmes that so permitted. The advent of the new media, especially since 2006, has brought with it an entirely novel scene of content generator-user links that have virtually knocked out the ‘receiver' notion. Abundant evidence to this evolution may be easily observed in internet-based social networks, now duly developing into Mankind's largest-ever hub for the traffic of ideas, images and sounds. An insight into the modalities of how this hub functions would lead directly to recognising that the time separator between content-generation and content-usage has diminished to zero as so indicated by, to cite only one example, the Twitter RT feature, in addition to the favourite and like/dislike button clickability on most new media outlets. This particular characteristic, which is a technology gift, has turned content-generators and content-users into one mass within the new media structure. For the first time ever in the history of modern media, a relation based upon both equity and full integration develops between content-generators and users. Gone are the days of referring to two parties in the media cycle, one active and the other a simple, passive recipient. What we find now is one mass of digital folk. The cumulative effect of this development will most certainly have an enormous reflection on the shape, pace and nature of human knowledge and even on the very modalities of human thinking.
