Stephen Downes

Drawing from his own experiences with a project called the Star Festival, linguistics professor Shigeru Miyagawa engages new media from the point of view of rejoining humanism and technology. In mass media, he argues, there is a clear demarcation between producer and consumer. But in new media, "the ultimate goal is to make the reader be no longer a consumer, but a producer of the content....The idea is simple: Break down the distinction between the producer and the consumer of the media."