Impact of technology

Production 

“A broader version of conventional literacy, which enables all visual, aural and digital forms, seeking to enable people to become thoughtful producers and interpreters of media” (Peter Fraser)

“By looking at how culture is used and transformed by social groups, cultural studies see people not simply as consumers, but as potential producers of new social values and cultural language” (Toby Miller 2006) new media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger etc. is a classic example of consumers becoming producers and, as Miller says, ‘potential producers of new social values and cultural language’ because any individual can reach as mass audience.

Gauntlett (2007) goes as far as to say that new media (and new media technologies) erodes the boundary between producer and audience to the extent that it makes little sense to talk about media audiences at all anymore: “Conventional research methods are replaced—or at least supplemented by new methods which recognise and make use of people's own creativity, and brush aside the outmoded notions of 'receiver' audiences and elite 'producers' (Gauntlett, 2007)

Distribution/Exhibition 

“A new generation of UK media power players are ditching the traditional gatekeepers and going straight to their audience via the web” (Plunkett 2008)

“The view that the internet and new digital media as an optional extra is replaced with the recognition that they have fundamentally changed the ways we engage with all media” (David Gauntlett 2007)

“As people individually and collectively progress the web, they’re increasingly in command…this is the new consumer power. It’s not the ability to swap suppliers at the click of a mouse…It’s the power to become the supplier – in effect to become an economic power themselves” (Tapscott and Williams 2006)
And, it isn’t just the web that is giving people this power, though it is critical in terms of exhibition and reaching a wide audience, it is also advances in digital cameras, editing software etc that narrows the gap and makes it possible for consumers to become producers.