The struggle for recognition online: - When users become media personas

As a result of the democratization of media technologies new interactive media has opened up for alternative ways for people to express themselves in mediated spaces. It is an interactive space recognized by its cut and paste culture, where trust and ontological security emerges out of ‘folksonomies' based upon the recommendations and the content exchange between individuals.

The content generated by users varies from creative pieces of art to political issues but also very personal stories about everyday life are accompanied by photos in such a way that you may talk about digital and personal life stories. Furthermore we have seen the advent of YouTube, MySpace and several other sites for sharing user generated content.

These media phenomena also present a kind of content that encompasses sociability and community potentials that imitate and draw on conventions from traditional mass media genres, which poses new challenges for traditional broadcast media and their position as the public sphere. With new media the sharing of communication is no longer mass mediated but mediated through a mass of media.

On one hand, sites with user generated content have made everyday people into everyday papparazi, and as such have created a media environment where everyday people find themselves in a ‘middle-region'(Meyrowitz 1985) and therefore must find new ways of behaving in private as well as in public spaces. The blurring of these spaces have thus become even more evident due to the fact that personal and intimate matters in everyone's everyday life now have public interest and public matters are being made more intimate and personal as well.

On the other hand it is the exposure and the mediated presence that becomes a quality in itself so to speak and therefore becomes an important element for individuals to construct identities and make sense of their lives. Continuing on from G.H. Mead, Axel Honneth states that "In perceiving one's own vocal gesture and reacting to myself as my counterpart does, I take on a decentred perspective, from which I can form an image of myself and thereby come to a consciousness of my identity[...] Individuals can only become conscious of themselves in the object-position."(Honneth 2006)

Hence people gain access to themselves in a mediated public space, become conscious of themselves in the object-position and gain personal recognition in mediated spaces. Through mediated social interaction people acknowledge themselves and become private individuals in society, or as understood through the words of John Dewey:"the private grows out of the public; personal understanding emerges from shared communication."(Dewey 1954)