Examples

• new technologies mean that the audience are no longer passive receivers of news
• Audiences now create their own content
• Key to this change has been the development of new technologies

Theory
Hyper-reality is a term used in semistics & post-modern philosophy to describe an inability of conscious to distinguish reality from a stimulation of reality, especially in technology ordained post modern society.  

Benefits of institutions

• Twitter and flickr came to the forefront during the Mumbai bombings in India in late November 2008
• Rather than launch their own challenge, they simply buy the site. 
• Flickr is now owned by Yahoo!, 
• YouTube was bought by Google,
• Microsoft invested in Facebook,
• News Corp., owned by Murdoch, bought MySpace.

Benefits of audience

• Having caught Rodney King, an African-American, after a high speed chase, the officers surrounded him, tasered him and beat him with clubs. The event was filmed by an onlooker from his apartment window.
• The natural disaster of the Asian Tsunami on December 26th 2004 was another turning point for UGC. Much of the early footage of events was provided from citizen journalists
• It was on Twitter again that the story of the Hudson River plane crash on January 15th 2009 was broken to the world. With a dramatic picture of a plane half sinking in the river, and passengers crowded on the wing awaiting rescue Janis Krun tweeted

Murdoch Paywall

1) I agree with Murdoch that the BBC should not be allowed to provide free news online as this means that this would lose a lot of consumers for institutions that don't provide free news as many people would want to get there news for free therefore they would instantly go to BBC website instead of paying and this would make them lose out on a lot of customers.
2) I think that Murdoch was right to put his new content (The Times, The Sun) behind a paywall as this allows Murdoch to get more money than others as many institutions offer free news meaning it would be a lot harder for them to make a lot of money, therefore the uses of putting a paywall would most likely bring him a lot more money than advertisement and giving out free news

Number 11

Social Sharing Sends 'Flappy Bird' Developer to Top of the iOS App Store

Monday February 3, 2014 8:18 am PST by Kelly Hodgkins

Indie developer Dong Nguyen has achieved an App Store first -- he has three apps in Apple's Top Free Apps list including the viral hit Flappy Bird [Direct Link], the now #2 Super Ball Juggling [Direct Link] and the #8 Shuriken Block [Direct Link]. Dong is unable to explain his recent success, chalking it up to luck and not any particular effort on his part. As a result, it likely wasn't Dong's activity but the power of the social Internet that propelled his games to the upper echelon of the App Store. 


Dong notes in an interview with Elaine Heney of Chocolate Lab Apps (via TechCrunch) that he did zero promotion for Flappy Bird and claims he doesn't even own the social network accounts for the app.

"I didn’t use any promotion methods. All accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram about Flappy Bird are not mine. The popularity could be my luck."

What Heney did notice about Flappy Birds was a viral campaign to write the best review for the game. As a result of this challenge, the app now has over 47,000 reviews and almost a half a million ratings. These statistics put Flappy Bird on par with powerhouse apps likeEvernote and Gmail. 

Flappy Bird launched in May 2013 and only recently topped the iOS App Store charts. The app challenges players to keep a flying bird from running into pipes by tapping the screen. Its 8-bit graphics give the appearance of simplicity, but it is a deceptively difficult game that is so hard to master that most people score in the single digits and brag about their failure. Dong's other two hits are equally basic and are likely receiving attention due to the popularity of Flappy Bird.

This game was promoted all over internet from the uses of celebrities tweeting and also instagram explaining their confusion of the game but also how addictive its become. This has led to many people downloading the game and becoming an instant online hit