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