Participation and spectatorship: Has everything changed with new media?
Even prior to the rapid development of Web 2.0 technologies and their widespread use, Croteau and Hoynes argued, the decline in political participation was “accompanied by media coverage that treats political life as a spectator sport” (2000, p.236).
Despite the excited and occasionally hyperbolic talk about the newest social media, it seems not much has changed. This not only applies to the extent to which any prosumptive activity is occurring, but also how audiences are receiving content.
If we accept Wesch’s 90-9-1 rule (Snickars and Vondreau 2012), we see that a super majority of social media users are very casually engaged with a few of the mostly popular sites. Hindman’s (2008) research demonstrates that all but very few Internet users view political material online. The ability for Internet users to more easily select and tailor the content they view drives 10% of web visits to adult websites, 2.9% to news sites, and just over one-tenth of 1% to political sites. An elite group of social media super-users are producing most content. As Manovich (2012) confirms only 1.5% to as low as 0.5% of social media users are submitting content.
Under what Dean (2008) calls "communicative capitalism," the extent of participation is much less important than the political meaning of participation itself. Producing and circulating content has replaced political action, all while the engagement with social media is identified with political action in the minds of many users. They have the illusion that transmitting messages is the same as communication, and that these behaviors constitute political action. What is mostly happening, Dean argues, is that these messages are never received, and therefore the communication is illusory. Since the connection between producing a message and altering material political conditions is presumed rather than actualized, the transition from participation as content-production to participation in politics is rarely performed.