Good term: The People Formerly Known as the Audience

There’s a great opinion piece on The Huffington Post today about a mind-shift needed about the former roles of information providers and the "audience." Essentially, the author, Jay Rosen, spells-out why that’s over.

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people
of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform
shift you’ve all heard about.

It’s mainly about the web vs mass media and it’s an almost gloating description of how the-worm-has-turned. But there’s one paragraph that suggests that other kinds of institutions–not just ol’ MSM–should give this some thought.

A highly centralized media system had connected people "up" to big
social agencies and centers of power but not "across" to each other.
Now the horizontal flow, citizen-to-citizen, is as real and consequential as the vertical one.

Yeah, I think this applies to cancer-patients and cancer-concerned communities. It’s now about the horizontal flow.

Correction: I see that these comments are not Jay Rosen’s but were sent to him by someone not identified by name. Still…it speaks for me. Oh, and there’s this opinion in WIRED called "People Power."