New Media: The Future of the News and Entertainment - Term Paper Example

Table of contents Introduction.. p.2 Thesis ment.p. 2 The passing of the baton from traditional to new media p.3 Conclusion... p.7 References p.9 New Media - the vehicle for progress Introduction These are the revolutionary times as new media has brought a seismic change in communication. The recent information and communication technologies, as well as those that are waiting to be discovered in near future, have laid down the foundation of the global information based society. Humanity is very quickly adapting to the technological novelties. People are adjusting to all the innovations and changes instantly and readily. The appetite for newer ways of getting information and entertainment are increasing. The young are being fed infotainment instead of information and entertainment separately. Since computer and communication is the spine of the news and entertainment industry, the creation and use of new media is aided by the power of computer processing. In other words, it is an expression of interactive creativity in the technologies like communication, multimedia and computers. Hence websites, wikis, blogs, podcasting, mobile devices, e-mails and attachments, interactive television, virtual world, video games, hypertext fiction, and electronic kiosks are at present considered new media. What is new media today will become traditional media after a few years. Therefore the point to focus on is where is the new media heading This question leads us to the thesis statement of the essay, which is as follows: Thesis Statement The new media is making our future more advanced at an accelerating pace. The passing of the baton from traditional to new media One major way in which everyone has been affected by the wave of new media is that, now the media does not present information and entertainment to us but with us. People are not passive audience of the media but actively participate in all the media related activities, as new media is highly interactive in nature. The audience decides what it wants to see or listen. Media is no longer controlled by companies but by its audiences. People do not just read content but make content too. It has become so interactive that people are using the older media to connect to the revolution brought in by the newer media. One's voice on the web can be put up with ease. Just get it recorded and it's on the web passing your message to the people you wanted to interact about every possible issue. One to many communication is becoming a thing of past. One-on-one communication is the trend that is building up so in future the role of journalists will be limited. This threat has resulted in many improvisations in the way the journalist's present information. In an attempt to sustain the competition from new media, they have become very interactive. They no more look as media people, but people among us catering to our requirements of infotainment. Though the journalists are present amongst us they are loosing their characteristics or in other words the audience are becoming journalists in their own ways. The blog trend is catching up. In the coming 10 years we will turn to blogs for news in virtually every field of interest. Whether it is business, politics, or other social issues, the blog is going to become credible first-hand vehicle of information. Similar to the blog small content management system, self-publishing, systems integrating audio and video publishing etc. would be the source of information in the next decade. The computer is becoming an integral part of all activities in virtually every thinkable area of our growth process. To improve corporate collaborations, the business leaders are turning to wikis and blogs. These two have the potential to make emails a part of the traditional media. In fact emails have been started being treated as snail mails. It has been observed in the journal 'Information Age' (2006, p. 27) that " wikisare easier to manage than hundred of emails. The theory is - much like open source software development - that if mistakes are made on a wiki, other readers can correct it." By the time one is getting accustomed to a new media it is being termed old media and being updated with a more advanced version of the technology. This is how our growth is getting accelerated so much that it can be predicted that within next ten years all the new things of today will become a thing of past. Hence the TV would be compelled to take the properties of the computer. There are chances of more and more instances of convergence - interlinking the computer, the telephone and the TV through which via satellite signals and telephone lines large chunks of information would get easily transmitted. So TV will stay but its characteristics will change to keep pace with the new media. In this context, Rayner, Wall and Kruger (2004, p. 221) have rightly observed: "the way in which audiences consume the media is also likely to undergo radical change. One such change is the ability of individual members of the audience to determine their personal patterns of media consumption rather than being at the mercy of schedules determined by television broadcasters. Just as the VCR in the 1980's allowed people to time shift programmes to fit with their own lifestyles, so digital and broadband technologies should enable audiences to call up programmes, films or information on demand." Though the idiot box is not the hot thing these days, TV on mobile phones is the choice of the next generation. So if the old media has to survive it has to improvise itself in such a way that it gets assembled well with the new media. One example of this is that with the help of the emerging technology it will be possible to remotely access from any location, TV channels, music and photos and even recorded or live media from the home based personal computers. For entertainment like listening to music, people will totally turn online. The online music stations are slowly sweeping off the trend of buying CD. Since accessing one's favorite and rare piece of music will become more cost effective online music will rule in the coming decade. Perhaps better ways of listening music will erupt which is difficult to predict now. There will in fact be a very thin line between the providers and receivers of entertainment and information. Many people from the new generation have already started and as their enthusiasm show will be engaged in even larger numbers in creating digital information and entertainment, blurring the difference between the consumers and suppliers. To quote, Kluth, "the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 57% of American teenagers create content for the internet-from text to pictures, music and video." (para. 6) Thus our demand for entertainment is changing the content in such a way that we even get information splurged with a dash of entertainment. So the old definition that news is information has to be updated. Now news is a combination of informartion and entertainment very thoughfully defined as infotainment. News is not same for everybody as everyone has different tastes. This was true since the very beginning, only it has been recognised now and it is in the future that this aspect of difference in audience taste would be catered to appropriately. So the era of a few giant media companies is getting over. Now there are numerous smaller companies that cater to different branches of news. They might merge at times when required and then again work independently as and when the situation demands. Blogs are the perfect examples of different news sources that are available. This arena will be getting more well structured in the years to come. It will be very foolish to expect that millions of people are loyal to the same media. In the coming years there will be a spurt of highly loyal but exclusive audience for all the different sourcrs of infotainment. Hence the number of media would be more. As a result the number of highly devoted audience for each media would be less than what's now in today's mass media. The future of advertising is also going to have a drastic change. Online advertising has become a very powerful medium to reach consumers. This medium is poised for further growth. Advertisers would aim to devise ways in which ads and contents are matched in a high quality manner. Since blogs and highly focussed sites would create an even more specific market sectors, contextual text based advertisements would become all the more popular and trustworthy. There is no doubt that there might be a spurt in ads only sites or channels on specific products or themes, making the so called new media - online advertising approaches of today, a part of the traditional media. With this according to Lawrence (2006, p. 66) "even small companies with niche products can promote their wares alongside obscure search terms." Conclusion The traces of modernity have started unveiling itself. There is more to the big picture then what is evident now. This is just the evolution stage of the new media ecosystem. The follwing are the observations made by Kentbye after speaking to several top personalities on issues related to the growth of new media and its impact in future. All of them felt that the new media has adorned such an important role for the growth of the humanity because: Not only people of a particular region but of the entire world are getting bored with the traditional media. The revolution brough in by the internet is not only on the supply but demand side too. The audiences are capable of supplying their own demand and hence have adorned an integrated persona of both the producer and the consumer. The intelligence of the society at large is transcended by the intelligence of the network. Technology have the potential to change all the spheres of life including the backbones of our society - media, culture and politics. Sincee internet has the capability to change many things there are yet many discoveries to be made. Though new media like blogs and wikis will give stifff competition to the traditional media there is still some hope for the traditional media as they are intelligently being assembled with new ones. More choice and control is being demanded by modern audience. Centralized sources of media would no longer be responsible for culture. Bottom-up grassroots and top-down hierarchy of all spheres will come closer due to the new media wave. Thus to conclude, new media is rightly being identified as a personal and participatory media rather than mass media. The more the increase in the participation and interest level of the massess in the new technologies, the greater will be the advancement. The growth has accelerated the whole characteristics of the news and entertainment industry. Journalism no longer lectures to the audience but makes conversations with the audience. Very soon there will even be a further change when the audience will lecture on what it wants, when it wants and how it wants. So as it was for the traditional media, for new media too, the audience is everything but in a totally different garb. Word count: 1858 References Boar, B.H. (2 Ed.). (2001). The Art of Strategic Planning for Information Technologies. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Mackay, H., Ivey, D. (2004). Modern Media in the home: An Ethnographic Study Italy: John Libbey Publishing - CIC Srl. Rayner, P., Wall, P., Kruger, S. (2004). Media Studies: The Essential Resource. London: Routledge. Lawrence, A. (Nov. 2006). Less Is More. Information Age. (Aug. 2006). The email killers. Information Age. Kentbye. (2005). Retrieved Apr. 17, 2007 from http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/168 Kluth, A. (2006). Retrieved Apr. 17, 2007 from http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfmstory_id=6794156 Read More