This is a very important essay to me, written by me. This is an A-Level Media Studies coursework piece written in 1997.

I was a student of the media who cared deeply to understand how our media worked, and one who noted incongruities in the representations of my culture in our media. Aged 16, I had also held a long interest in using technology.

During A-Levels, I had begun reading Wired magazine, which suddenly united all these subjects (politics, culture, art, technology and media) and more in a riotous clash of monthly ideas. I felt as though my pent-up frustration at the media-economic systems, about which I was learning, was about to burst forth in to grand possibility. Suddenly, it was clear to me - the power to communicate would no longer rest with he who owned a printing press or broadcast transmitter. The one-to-many communications model could yield to a glorious many-to-many future in which everyone had the ability to publish for themselves, to each other and to be communicated back with in a bursting that would secure authentic, balanced representation of culture. I had, indeed, drunk John Perry Barlow's Kool Aid.

These were ideas I was writing about as early as 1995 and 1996. They were ideas that have come to pass in today's internet - I'm proud, to be frank, that I was one of the few people at that time identifying the possibilities, advocating how our new media might change societies for the better. They have. In a sense, we prophesied "social media".

But today, I'm sometimes chagrined that the vulgar "social media" crowd acknowledges this revolution as its own, as only a recent phenomenon. No, this was a cultural shift others amongst us identified and helped bring in to being 15 years earlier.

This A-Level essay was the first major essay in a series of works that took me through university writings and focused on the media society that was about to change. Back then, it felt like no-one knew it and I was one of the few crazy soothsayers spewing words from the future on the street corner.

Audience Participation and the Evolution of Broadcast Models in the Brave New Media PDF

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