ABSTRACT
YouTube, MySpace and iPad-contemporary media culture is rife with discourses tapping into and expressing individualism. Particularly Web 2.0 applications invite individuals to put user-generated content online, to join social network sites like Facebook, to express themselves on blogs and to ‘broadcast themselves’ in personal movies on YouTube. Agency, personal autonomy and (inter)active control over media content are at the heart of new media’s ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2006, Schäfer 2009, Taylor 2006). Media theorists like Jenkins argue that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift since ‘audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture’ (Jenkins 2006: 24). New digital media culture, it is held, is not so much anymore about the omnipotence of a ‘culture industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002 [1944]), its dominant-hegemonic ideology and media texts that may or may not be ‘decoded’, negotiated or opposed by the audience (for example, Fiske 1998, Hall 1980). It is primarily about handing over the means of production to an emancipated, critical audience and facilitating self-expression for the individual.
