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problems in the organisation of communications that connect to problems for
democracy, communication empowerment and cultural exchange. How far do
these problems persist? One set of answers is derived from the continuing rele-
vance of mass media and the attendant problems that the CPE tradition has
outlined since the 1970s: concentration, control, commercialisation. However, it
is argued that CPE is stuck gazing backwards at problems that are being
resolved in the reconfigured environments of new media.

New media: participation and empowerment

The context of broad claims and counterclaims for the Internet was examined in
chapter five. Here I want to pursue claims for digital empowerment and their
consequences for media power. To clear some ground, there is little disagreement
that we are in the midst of a digital revolution that has already had profound
impacts, including the diffusion of new forms of communication power to users.
In the mass media era of the mid twentieth century, communication power was
concentrated in the hands of providers and most people lacked ready access to
channels of mass communications. Today, a rapidly increasing number of people
worldwide have individual access to communication resources that allow them to
publish to mass audiences, to access billions of gigabytes of information and to
exchange and share all kinds of data. The ‘people formerly known as the audience’
(Rosen 2006) can now participate, can create and co-create as well as consume.
For Castells (2009: 57) this diffusion of communication power means that ‘social
actors and individual citizens around the world are using the new capacity of
communication networking to advance their projects, to defend their interests, and
to assert their values’. Meikle and Young (2011: 10) concur, ‘The convergent
media environment is making possible an enormous redistribution of a certain
kind of power – the power to speak, to write, to argue, to define, to persuade –
symbolic power … For many people, the media are no longer just what they
watch, listen to or read – the media are now what people do’.

CPE responses
Many of the claims of Internet celebrants are directly countered by sceptics who
argue that there is rising disinformation and disempowerment rather than
advancement. However, there are a number of important arguments advanced by
CPE scholars against aligning with either. First the celebrants include many like
Benkler (2006) who offer a compelling and progressive vision of non-commodified
communication that radicals share. The key disagreement is not the vision but
the capability of realising it, given the dominance of capital. Second, the choice
between celebrant and sceptic accounts cannot be easily or satisfactorily decided.
It is better, argue Curran et al. (2012), to examine specific contexts in their
complexity than adopt simple explanatory narratives. McChesney (2013) argues
that both celebrants’ and sceptics’ accounts lack what a political economy