We have focused on how the Web 2.0 environment has been emerged and how it has affected the public affairs and political campaigns.

It may be a time to look into the public, ourselves.

I found an interesting article, Swarming media: (the) audience (2.0): How shakira, dirty harry, and del.icio.us have come to define interactive subjectivity (2007), written by Nathan Lovejoy, an editor for LimeWire. This article actually talks about Audience 2.0 but I think we can relate the term to "public 2.0" or users of "Web 2.0" easily.

Lovejoy explicated Audience 2.0 with separation of “audience” and “the audience.”

He views “audience” and “the audience” are essentially the same word but they entail opposite implications when speaking of interaction.

Basically the difference between audience and the audience is the scarcity which determines the control and power.

While audience implies knowingness and hearingness and holds a far higher value than that of speaking, for example, as seen in Court of Audience,

the audience refers to the mass of disenfranchised participants where one’s audience has a very low value.

It is that audience has become the audience under the mass media culture and the individuals have lost their identities under the weight of the mass.

However, the author deems audience/the audience has regained (but not totally) its power and control by its new identity created collectively and socially in Web 2.0. By using del.icio.us – a social bookmarking tool - as an example, he postulates that the individual’s identity is no longer defined by a collective other, the mass (or the mass media) but by multiple sources including the individual himself.

As a result, (the author claims) the new audience, audience 2.0, does not lose its identity under the gigantic system of the mass, “but at the same time he loses the ability to define the reinstated selfness on his own.”

Woong Jo Chang   3/3/2008