The Advent of New Technologies - Essay Example

Introduction With the advent of new technologies, we are witnessing the emergence of various new media in our world today, as we approach, in McLuhan's words, "the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media."(McLuhan, 1997). In other words we are already living a little through the media, because we today come to know of what has occurred on the other side of the world in very short order after it has happened. And since the world is getting better connected, media is playing an increasingly important role in shaping our society. One of the nascent media to have emerged in the past decade is that of online news, where users can hook up on the internet to catch the latest in the world in politics, economics, sports, and entertainment, and a host of other fields besides. Literature review There has been academic interest and study in the field ever since its origin and the reasons that newspaper companies go for online services are the availability of equipment necessary to provide such services at more affordable rates than ever before to both the news industry and to the news consumer as well as the loss of subscribership in certain traditionally strong markets.(Hansen, Martin, 1998). The general theory behind McLuhan's take on the emergence of new media is striking : ".....in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology". While the importance of medium is celebrated by those like McLuhan by saying, "The medium is the message" in preference to the content it carries, there are those like Eveland and Dunwoody (2002) who noted the difference in format and content lay out between the new media and the traditional one, in this case online news and print media. We can add context to online news and its use by considering the household where this media is used, as a moral economy, where the economic activities of its members are informed by a set of cognitions, evaluations and aesthetics, which are themselves defined by the histories, biographies and politics of the household and its members(Silverstone, Hirsch, Morley, 1992). Schultz (2000 )has shown the contextual relevance of news to society, and the imperatives that drive it with regard to democracy, business and politics. Still others like Wacjman(1994) refute technological determinism and hold that new technology arises from the old, is an intrinsic part of the society from which it arises, in answer to its economic needs, especially the need for profit of the big business corporations, and we need to study this aspect of online news. Althaus and Tewksbury (2002) held that the agenda-setting effectsof news is reduced in the case of online news readers compared to readers of the print news version. Web news produces smaller learning effects than print news, as demonstrated by Eveland and Dunwoody (2002). These differences could be due to increased selectivity in online news consumption(Klapper, 1960). and this recognised aspect of media consumption applies to online newspapers as well. Also important for an understanding of online news , and its situation in the ecology of media are the studies on interactivity carried out by Fredin and David (1998) who developed a model called the Hypermedia Interaction Cycle (HIC), with three stages: namely, preparation, exploration, and consolidation. The concept of remediation as studied by Bolter and Grusin(1999) also becomes relevant to online news as we see it emerge from the shadows of the print media, and take on some of the characteristics of television through the use of technologies like webcasting and video streaming. Situation briefing Shayla Thiel in her journal article, "The Online Newspaper:A Postmodern Medium"cites two factors that contributed directly to the origin of the online newspaper: 'First, there was the founding of news wire services (generally to balance the cost of newsprint; they made it less necessary to have bureau reporters). ....The second trend started with the birth in the early 1980s of McPaper, USA Today, which fit a generation of traveling generalists..... colorful cover and short, multicultural human-interest stories as a model for generic community papers across the country, rather than the modernist model of straight-ahead news...The online newspaper picks up where McPaper leaves off. Regardless of whether it belongs to ... the online publication's home page features both AP news and an amalgamation of lively and sometimes-interactive info-graphics updated throughout the day'. (Thiel, 2001) In their book, "Online News and the Public"(2004) Driscoll, Garrison and Salwen outline the actual process of the evolution of the online newspapers from extant technology, tracing it back to the 1980's, a decade before it actually came into being. "In 1983, the Knight-Ridder newspaper group and AT&T launched a revolutionary experiment to bring people news on demand through their computers or television sets. The videotext service, called Viewtron, was a forerunner of online news media" . They then proceeed to describe how Viewtron as well as a similar venture at the Los Angeles Times called Gateway became failed ventures because they lacked the technology of the World Wide Web which came into being first in the year 1990 with Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the server and client software. This software flourished into the Web, and became user-friendly when Marc Andreessen wrote a browser program called Mosaic in 1993 and went on to co-found an organisation called the Mosaic Communications, Inc., which was later renamed Netscape. The next year saw the emergence of America Online (AOL) and the Chicago Tribune ( http://www.chicagotribune.com ) became the first newspaper to go online when it began to supply same-day editorial content to AOL. The online newspaper emerged, borrowing from the traditinal newspaper and television, but has a long way to go before supplanting them: "the new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized. The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways"(Bolter, Grusin, 1999).There are technologies that have today made the online newspaper possible, and made it ready to compete with the traditional newspaper and television, due to the additional ability to present videos of the events, and even webcasts on a routine basis, besides being available at the click of a mouse: 'Four technologies changing the way news is produced and consumed on the web are audio and video streaming, multimedia digital editing, wireless application protocol with Cyberdisplay and interactive images....Audio and video formats are compressed to allow data to travel over a network using a CODEC (Coder/DeCoder)....This streaming technology has allowed media providers to broadcast live on the world wide web... however low bandwidth limits the consumer's ability to receive data. A scalable technology will ensure an unbroken audio stream by scaling the amount of video data transmitted. ....The launch of broadband networks and optical fibre networks have been designed to overcome this limitation'.(Keshwani, Tickle 2001) Online news as we see it today, is a culmination of various technological advancements, not the least of them the ability to take pictures and videos from anywhere and upload on the internet, to be posted at the website within minutes of the photo being taken. The technological know-how for online newspapers evolved from other technology that existed beforehand.This culmination of technolgies arose out of a need for a cheaper, more plausible medium to publish news. With the rising cost of newsprint and of employing beureau reporters, publishers found an affordable alternative in news online: 'The availability of equipment necessary to provide such services is more affordable than ever before to both the news industry and to the news consumer. The loss of subscribership in certain traditionally strong markets has also spurred the industry to look for ways to shore up that revenue stream. ....Coincidentally, newsprint prices increased nearly 37 percent between 1994 and 1996, then dropped again. The price fluctuation drew sharp attention to the need within the newspaper industry for alternative delivery systems'. (Hansen, Martin, 1998) We note that online newspapers rose out of a need in the economy and society, and is hence embedded in the social context. News in itself is a powerful force, because it helps its audience, namely the society, to make political and economic decisions.Online newspapers provide more news at the click of a mouse than can be absorbed from an entire gamut of newspapers, and can thus be presumed to have a tremendous impact on society.To understand the nature and extent of this impact, one needs to study the characteristics of the medium itself, what advantages it provides over the traditional newsprint, and what are the aspects at which it falls short. Development First and most impotant is the structure and layout of these newspapers online, which is very different from that of conventinal newspapers. The newspaper sites with the best designs layer the available information by providing hyperlinks to all aspects of the story from a brief but very imformative summary report. On clicking these links the user can get more-indepth information on the topic in the news. This has a few implications. The use of hyperlinks means that the structure is linear.It is very different from the traditiponal newpaper with its front page section, and its headlines and their type sizes which gives the reader the opinion and commentary of the editor on various topics. No such guidance is available to the readers of the online newspaper, "Because online newspapers do not allow readers to thumb through and physically relate to the organization of the online publication, readers must organize and prioritize their news mentally.... many stories deemed important enough to run on the front page of the print edition are not deemed timely or important enough to run on the front of the paper's Web site".(Thiel,2001) On the other hand, they may very well be confused at the plethora of information available to them, and some may not be techno-savvy enough to access all parts of the news, or may even have negative emotional responses: '....the challenges associated with knowing where you are in the network, finding needed information, downloading files and updates, or working with new applications endemic to the online environment should evoke a range of emotional responses in users..... a sense of mastery or disorientation, confidence or uncertainty, satisfaction or frustration, either in conjunction with cognitive outcomes like knowledge gain or as a primary response to complexity'.(Bucy, Newhagen, 2004) There is also the changeability of the online newspaper, since it is easy to update, the stories change frequently both in order and content either because a better picture is available later or a new event has taken place. Some news websites even change their content according to the time of the day, more serious political, business or economy-related news during the day, and more infotainment at night, based on surveys and feedback on what sort of users log in at what times. 'Because the online newspaper is never "put to bed," is never completely finished so long as there is news to report (or readers to receive that news for the first time as they log on at various hours of the day and night), the individual stories are not the message of the online paper. Instead, the message is in the overall "look and feel.".... Readers have to be sold on the content by the general look and feel of the site rather than the news itself.(Thiel, 2001) This perpetual change may mean that the readers could be disoriented, and be unable to re-find the same piece of news in the evening that was read in the morning. The medium here is indeed the message, to reiterate the theory of McLuhan, and this affects the reliability quotient of the newspaper in user's eyes. Frequent changes and an emphasis on style rather than substance also means that online newspapers do not fulfil one function they are supposed to: of helping a citizen make an informed decision on a political, social or economic matter of importance, a fact could have serious social consequences. Also important is the question of credibility, because in their hurry to scoop, online news may not have enough time to double check the facts behind the events before reporting them. Online newspapers do not give a sense of history and record, which some of the papers are trying to remedy by providing online archives.All this leads to a loss of authority, the online version of the newspaper does not carry as much weight because of its transient, intangible nature. Interactivity is another feature that the online newspapers boast of , where their readers can not only read the news article but also comment on it and rate it, as well as write to the reporters. They feature discussion boards and chat rooms where the issues of the day can be thrashed out between the readers or the articles themselves can be criticized or commended. There are photographs, cartoons and multimedia like live video and audio.But not many of these features are present in all the online newspapers, and the local ones do not handle so much of excluvive matters of local interest.Yet another aspect of the online websites is their offer of customized content to the readers, where the readers can either read the given news at will depending on the appeal of it sheadline or opt for an RSS(Really Simple Syndication) feed, in which case news from various places on their topics of interest will be delivered to them on their computers. This helps readers deal with the barrage of information available to them, but this may also mean that they are not exposed at all to news that is important to their cognitive rights and duties as citizens.What the readers choose to go through is also influenced by the ratings received by the articles from the other readers, which are featured by most websites.This sometimes leads to a bandwagon effect, where the higher rated stories become more popular, only a few choose to read the poorly rated ones, in order to stand out from the herd and be unique. The editors decide what stories to put on online newspapers also somewhat based on ratings, in order to earn more page hits. This means that the genre of news stories put up on these news websites could be influnced by the opinion of an unknown quantity of people, from unknown demographics or locations, and this could have serious social consequences: if infotainment and gossip are more popular, they might be put up at the cost of articles that discuss crucial issues. Due to the tendency to browse the net, a lot of online news is just skimmed through, where retention levels for the reader are low, and not enough context and interpretation of the news topic is apparent on the very top layers. And in such a scenario, the readers provide what is lacking by building it up in their own minds. While interpretations may be individual, the context cannot be imagined, and in the case of online news, the context often appears in links and hyperlinks which the reader often chooses not to click. Culturally, the solely online newspaper-reading society thus becomes removed from reality, making its judgments in contextual vaccum. Also important is the fact that for an online consumer, there is little difference in what appears on the screen: a game, news, juicy gossip, they are all there to be browsed through, and there is little on no knowledge or regard for the process that happens behind it. This takes them further away from valuing what they see on the newspaper online. But so far online newspapers have worked as supplements to the traditional media: "media supplementation refers to situations when a new medium provides additional desirable content that supplements the use of an old medium. As a case in point, the Internet helps supplement the traditional news media outlets by providing additional access to news and information". (Driscoll, Garrison, Salwen, 2004) A positive fallout of the online news and journalism is that the citizens can theoretically participate in the news, by reporting events that happen around them, through coverages taken on handheld cameras, we have a lot of instances of such coverages being used in online news, especially in the case of the Asian Tsunami and the September11 attacks. But one also has to take into account the fact that news moves at high speed on the net without any time for reactions from the affected parties. Driscoll, Garrison and Salwen note: " Zippergate illustrated how quickly a sensational news story could spread from the political fringes to the mainstream media through the Web with little time for critical appraisal and for the victimized party to repair or at least respond to the news". McLuhan(1997) is right in this respect when he writes that the action and the reaction occur almost at the same time in our world today. Conclusion All these aspects of online newspapers, like the layering of information, interactivity and transience that may lead to confusion, loss of credibility, selecetive exposure of news and so on are due to news corporations'efforts to accommodate differences in bandwidth, computing power and software applications, and not for the convenience of the user, which aptly illustrates Wajcman's point that profitability is a major factor for the shape a new technology might take. Until a scalable solution is available for the problem of limited bandwidth and more people are ready to pay money to subscribe to news online, the limitations of bandwidths and resources will churn out online news with all its positives as well as drawbacks. But since this is a young medium, barely a decade old, there is lots of hope in its future potential. Works Cited Althaus, S. L., & Tewksbury, D. 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