Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The world of media has changed and remains in continuous evolution.
This is an undisputable reality and we can no longer go back to the days
when newspapers, magazines and the TV were all that counted. The Internet
has broken all the rules of communications and has destroyed all the unwrit-
ten codes of information dissemination. However, what has remained con-
stant over the past centuries until today is man's need to communicate, to
be informed, to exchange and to share. As long as human beings exist, there
will always be a need to communicate but the form in which this communi-
cation will take place is what will continue to change and is to be continu-
ously addressed.
Today's media communications is about appeal, interactivity, sharing, col-
laborating, creating, exchanging, influencing, decoding, transparency, value,
content, richness, excitement, curating, instantaneousness, utility, relevance,
participation, editing and design. The rules of the game have changed from
push media to pull media. There is a change of attitude in media consump-
tion and people no longer want pre-structured communications and irrelevant
content. They are seeking to be instantly in tune with the media landscape
because they are now the architects of their own news and information. With
online tools like RSS feeds, newswire adoptions, newsletter subscriptions
and instant messaging on platforms like Twitter, consumers are choosing
what they want to see and hear, the frequency and increasingly the mode.
This movement began with the Internet and has been made popular by the
social web through blogs, social networks, user forums and chat rooms. It
is spreading across the landscapes of TV, radio and magazines as attested
by the popularity of the TV fast-forwarding service which allows adverts to
be skipped and pre-recording services that enable people to record only the
programs they're interested in to watch later. The TV is being referred to as
an “old-fashioned idiot box” by an entire generation that has realized that
they can very well live without television. On the print media front, the state
is even more alarming. Printed newspapers are considered as “so yesterday”
and the subscription rates of major international newspapers is dropping at
an average of 7 percent annually. Apart from hotels, corporate bodies and
associations, the newspaper circulation circuit is fast disappearing. Their
publishers are resorting to TV adverts in a bid to re-awaken some nostalgia
in the reading public. At the same time, newspapers have gone mainstream
online, providing mostly free content and, in some cases, interactivity while
depending on a business model of revenue generation through advertise-
ments. Magazines, although still maintaining higher levels of circulation,
are following the footsteps of newspapers in the online offering by provid-
ing free content in a bid to attract millions of readers and, subsequently,
paid advertisements. On the radio front, the picture is not much better. This
has become a communication medium that is accessed passively rather than
actively, meaning when we are in the shower, in the kitchen, in the car, in the
library or just to have some distant background sound.
