Friday, February 5, 2010

What is New Media?

Some technologies that are part of new media would be social networking sites, google search, wikis, blogs, and recently mobile technologies. New media has made the world a smaller place by allowing everyone and anyone with a computer to get information and stay connected with each other anywhere and anytime. Information gets passed on within minutes of occurrence for instance, " Jackson died at 2.26pm, LA time. At 2.44pm, TMZ informed the world of his death." (Brook, Michael Jackson: how celebrity gossip site TMZ got scoop of the decade).

Mobile technology has really advance in the few years as stated in the recent Forbes.com article, which said how websites are using text messages to help earthquake victims in Haiti. "Found a school that sent an emergency text for a live entrapment of kids… SAR team now dispatched to the right location to five decimal places" (Forrest, Technology Saves Lives in Haiti), we can expect more people to be helped by utilizing this technology. Think about possible future use of this tech, such as helping wounded soldiers and lost hikers etc.

Before, only people with advance technological skills and mucho money can put things up on the internet, but now anyone who wants to post something or upload a video on the internet can do so with just a few clicks of their mouse. Tools like youtube and photoshop has attended to all aspiring and amateur producers and developers etc. The internet is now an open source for everyone to play and have fun with. But, with so many people doing this, there's bound to be a lot of useless and unreliable things on the internet as well.

CNN, New York Times, to name a few were all consider to be 'old media'. Newspaper prints and television programs wasn't enough for the new media world (along with the new consumer trend) resulting in these old media's to advance with everything else. When new news come out, these big companies can have their stories up on the web rather than having to print it on paper, making information that much more accessible. Old media is simply enhanced and not replaced because again with everyone putting things up on the web, there will be a lot of unreliable information, this is when we look toward old media. We look for names we're familiar with and use their information instead of the various other sources on the web when we need to make a critical decision.

There is definitely different oppositions one can take on new and old media such as, "No one is going to mistake their 13-inch laptop screen for a 50-inch high-definition plasma" (Holson, Who Needs a TV? I'm Watching on a Laptop). There are things that the old excels in and things that the new excels in, but ultimately I believe the future is New Media.

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