----
When asked to write about an issue that engages me as a human being, and that has implications for the future global community, my first immediate reaction was to consider the role of mass media. After all, isn’t that where a significant proportion of the world’s industrialised population receive their information about the world around them? And doesn’t information (or even lack of information) shape a global community?
However, I realised in contemplation that the real driving force for information in the new millennium and for the new generation (dubbed Generation Y by certain researchers and journalists) wasn’t the traditional media outlets: it was themselves. As acknowledged by Time Magazine in 2006, the most influential person of last year was “you”. And it was “you” because of our role in user generated content through non-traditional digital mediums such as YouTube, Blogger, Xanga, and MySpace.
The rise of the new media, specifically blogs, online journals, interactive newspaper columns, and online diaries, has shaped and continues to shape the way that the global community interacts and communicates with each other. By providing a relatively censorship free channel for individual opinion and commentary, the new media circumvents the traditional media outlets and presents a more “realistic” or “honest” view of world events. As always, though, truth is in the eye of the beholder; certain levels of personal bias will always colour an account, but the new media allows for more than one view of the same event to be presented. In this way, the internet generation are able to fulfil their desire for a broader perspective and for a more unedited view of their world.
How could something like this have come about, though? What lead to the rise of the new media? It could be said that due to globalisation and the increasing use of the internet, it was inevitable that dialogue would occur in some form between different communities across the globe. In a sense, the explosion of a global communications network was pushed ahead by the arrival of mainstream internet access in 1995. The ability to communicate with someone on the other side of the world about topics of relevance, at a speed previously undreamt of, surely would lead down the path of free and open communication.
In time, that exact event occurred. Handwritten diaries became online diaries. Online diaries prompted the creation of software to maintain them. The software was then used to branch out from just diaries to become web-based opinion logs, coining the term “blog”. And after the humble beginnings of the online diaries in 1997, we had in 1999 the launch of Livejournal and Blogger. From there, it was only a matter of time until text, images, video, and audio were combined into a fully global online community website. The ubiquitous MySpace, haven for Western teenagers and the forefront of the Generation Y community on the internet, was created in 2003.
However, as much as I understand that technology has allowed the new media to exist and to flourish, I still find myself questioning the purpose of it all. Why is it so popular, and what effect is it having on society?
The answer to that conundrum lies in what society and the global community are developing into. Shaped by the world around us and the technologically advanced times that we find ourselves in, the younger generations have an innate desire to know more about their world and to connect at an unprecedented level to sources of information. The new media is the method that has come about to answer this desire. New methods of communication and response have developed to connect interested parties. “Old world” media sources such as broadsheet newspapers and the six o’clock news are reporting on information that was available six hours previously through the blogs. Traditional slants and worldviews as presented by old media are being bypassed in favour of on-the-scene accounts, images, and video from the ground. The true horrors of the invasion of
So, how has society reacted to this new media? Humanity is being brought together on a global scale over the internet, yet in our “real world” lives we are distancing ourselves from each other and from personal interaction. We are a generation of low social, political, and environmental activists. While the new media encourages a global sharing of ideas and circumvention of traditional mediums of communication, it also encourages it’s users to distance themselves to observe and comment, rather than to act.
The largest issue with the rise of the new media is the fall of genuine activity and involvement. As well as observing and commenting on the world, the general apathy of an entire generation must be lifted. Knowledge is power, and that power has been achieved. But is that power meaningless if people don’t have the will to use their knowledge to interact with and change the world for the better?
No comments:
Post a Comment