User:Lcoop01/sandbox

In his detailed documentation on how technological advancements have manifested the digital world, Gillmor illustrates from his personal experiences the ways in which advancements in the digital era have affected how users produce and receive information. He suggests that new technologies have enabled a more democratic exercise of information production and consumption, and how it has effectively re-shaped the role of the amateur journalist.

Focusing on "Big Media," and the ways in which their influences have shaped the public perspectives of society, he explains how the increased availability from which news is received has depleted the ability of major broadcasting companies from having mass influence over users. He insists that news is now more of a conversation, with more choices, voices, perspectives, and options, with Big Media's only strength being their depleting stocks of financial resources, and in turn their powerful presences during copyright and infringement investigations. Gillmoor references Thomas Paine and other early American pamphleteers and muckrakers that set the stage for a civic-minded, truth-seeking perspective on rebellion, liberty, and other aspects of government itself. These early social innovators set the stage for successive media revolutions, the most significant being worldwide, low-cost access to internet and having their own say about what is happening in the world.

Gillmoor stresses that new media cannot be traced chronologically, beyond the invention of the internet, blog format, and other open source entities that have allowed users to actively participate in online content. He specifies the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as a "catalyst to reveal how far journalism had come," in the ways that the personal videos and accounts of those that were affected by the attacks were more timely and accurate than the news reports at the time the action was occurring. The community that developed as a result of the simultaneous, relevant contributions from amateur journalists signified that the power of reporting the news was given to "everyday people given tools needed to join in emerging conversation on the web."