The newfound powers of the reader
Nowadays the reader has more substantial power than ever before. Beyond the power of choosing what to read, that he thought he always had possessed, the access to the information is now easier then ever. With the arising of the Internet the common reader was given an immeasurable quantity of power, he became more dynamic and effective on gathering information. The human being is a social being; we always relied on communication as the base to our societies. Being socials, all the information that we gather we are used to share it with others. Being the “others”, before the emerge of the Internet, the people who were close to us, family members, friends. But now, we have the opportunity to share the aggregation of knowledge for a wider range of people, people that we don’t necessarily know. We became authors, and that came with a cost, like Barthes said, “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author”. We give new meanings to the texts that we read, the New Media allows us to become the authors of the information that reaches us, due to the possibility of editing it or rewriting it. In addition to becoming authors, the New Media consented us with the verdict of the aspect of the information. Innumerable platforms allows the user to choose the appearance of the website. The New Media confer the consumer with designer characteristics. The Human being is autodidact, in addition with this abundance of information from various people, that practice contrasting professions, we learned to do a little of almost everything. And with all of these new attributes that were given to the consumer/reader some questions arose. If the New Media hadn’t loom, the power of the reader wouldn’t have grown? Could the power of the reader/consumer increase even more?