Top-down v. Bottom-up

            Webster and Ksiazek, using media-centric techniques to measure audience fragmentation in modern media, have noted themselves that it is difficult to measure “how consumers move across these [media] options…It could also be that people consume a variety of genres across multiple platforms,” (44) despite the ability of media-centric techniques to detail what providers of these media platforms are the most popular. For example, huge number of people use Google, but a much smaller number use WordPress, TripAdvisor, and Yelp – but whether or not all the people using Google use one or more of the lesser used platforms is difficult to tell, and even more difficult to tell which users use which platforms.

            What this demonstrates is Siochru’s identification of societal regulation of media, the purpose of which is to sustain and strengthen social, cultural, and political roles of media and enlarge the public sphere. Societal regulators are able to do this by insisting on media providers to offer a variety of platforms such as radio, TV, and Internet to cater to a wider group of audiences and better disseminate information across all groups of people.

            It is no wonder, then, that Mark Deuze in Convergence Culture in the Creative Industries discusses the power of citizen journalism taking hold across major media corporations. He uses the examples of Bluffton and Amazon where the media actually took into consideration user opinion, a bottom-up strategy, to better their organization. With the increase in communication technologies it is not longer the media corporations acting on behalf of their interests solely in telling us the public what the media corporations want the public to know; with the advent of social media sites such as Twitter, people at the bottom can use their networks to disseminate information they believe is important. These hot topics or even “trending” topics as they are on Twitter can be picked up by media outlets and used to disseminate news – news they know will be watched since, today, it’s quite easy to see what topics are popular. Convergence culture allows consumers “…to enact some kind of agency regarding the omnipresent messages and commodities of this industry,” (455). It is the mix of top-down and bottom-up strategies, but consumers are no longer reacting to news, but offering media outlets what news to report first, then reacting.