Online Audiences - Passive or Participatory?

From Rebecca Blood, author/creator of Rebecca's Pocket Blog
http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html

In Douglas Rushkoff's Media Virus, Greg Ruggiero of the Immediast Underground is quoted as saying, "Media is a corporate possession...You cannot participate in the media. Bringing that into the foreground is the first step. The second step is to define the difference between public and audience. An audience is passive; a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is public in its orientation."

This quote from Greg Ruggiero is very interesting to me, and speaks to one of my earlier posts. Although as a performer (former dancer), I would disagree with the thought that an audience is passive. I think an audience can be passive, if the speaker believes it to be true. But for me, as a dancer, the best performances were the ones in which the audience was actively engaged. Instead of feeling the imaginary 'fourth wall' separating the audience from the stage, that is stripped away and the audience is pulled in to the action. So Web 2.0 has allowed for the media 'fourth wall' to be stripped away. The audience is only passive if the subject chooses. Prior to Web 2.0, the subject (media) didn't have a choice, only those sophisticated in HTML could participate. But now everyone can, and so the question is how media can take advantage of the opportunity to pull the audience in.