ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book focuses on ordinary people and their forms of engagement with the media through participation in broadcast talk on television and radio. It examines the ways in which digital platforms such as YouTube and Twitter are functioning to provide new and shifting discursive relationships between media genres of public participation broadcasting and their growing web-based audience. The chapter explores the specific affordances and constraints of digital technologies and the development of audience interactivity that is increasingly characteristic of many of the media genres. It focuses on selection of broadcast environments where public participation involves the mediation of specific forms of discursive activities such as telling stories, opinion-giving and argument, evaluation and judgement and advice-giving. The chapter concludes with the different strands of the discussion throughout the book, and the arguments for a critical reconceptualisation of ordinariness in discourses of contemporary public participation broadcasting.
