Clay Sherki

Clay Shirky is an American writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and journalism. He believes that there is no longer such thing as a passive audience. A passive audience is someone who just watches the film "mindlessly" and doesn't actually thinking are using their brain. Instead he believes everyone is now a more 'active' audience which is people who like to be active and take part. He puts this down to technology. Technology has now changed how we view things and has changed our "expectations and behaviour". For example we want to be able to give our thoughts and ratings on a lot of things whether its an app, a video, a film or even something like rating players during a football game. 

This can clearly be seen with newspapers which are now predominantly online so people are able to leave their comments and thoughts on articles they read. Shirky believes this whole idea of wanting to talk back and be an active audience also applies to producers of media. We want to be able to give our thoughts and in a way be closer with the producers. 

The addition of the many social media apps such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook its now a lot easier for people to interact and directly give their thoughts to the producers. "Because of technology audiences are beginning to get more power".