When Crowdsourcing Meets Social Networks: a Return to the Future?

Abstract

Audience participation is evolving. On the other hand, digital technologies also provide the means for listeners to create and develop content.This behavior leads to the concept of participative radio based on crowdsourcing, enhancing the opportunities for listeners’ participation. But another tool, the social networks, also helps to shape new modalities for audience participation. Besides the vertical connection between radio stations and listeners, they establish a horizontal connection between their members. Such a horizontal connection creates a living entity made of listeners. This living entity is participative, active, connected, communicating and intelligent at the opposite of passive mass audience. But this collective intelligence will in turn open the door to new kind of structures such as collective and collaborative projects which structure is not only horizontal but also moving, evolving, or even discontinuous in time or in space because it is spread among all its the participants. We can find in this
trend a development of grassroots participation and content appropriation by the
audiences. Such a development is made possible and easier by digital technologies combining crowdsourcing and connection through the social networks.