The media changes everything, and everything is changing in the media.
Besides basic human rights, we can literally do almost EVERYTHING online. I look at myself and I seriously think I could spend my entire day using online sources. I shop online, I talk to my friends and family online, I watch lectures online, I search information online, I listen to music and watch movies online and I have access to all news sources online - I live online, and the best part of it all? It is all completely free! (except the shopping, but I am seriously saving heaps of money compared with buying it in stores, I swear!)
So now that I can have all this media access free, why would I pay for it? I believe entitlement will try and kill Journalism, just like eBay killed classifieds.
I guess in a way my media has always come free to me. My parents (and now my College) purchase newspapers, and my television and Internet usage is not paid by me either. Media is free, well, to an extent.
It wasn't always so free to us though, which was made apparent in today's lecture.
Today I took a step back and looked at media's progress over the recent years.
Bluntly, we have literally gone offline to completely online.
We now have these three stages of the web's growth - being Web 1.0 (the informative web mostly used by companies), Web 2.0 (the social web used for social networking such as Facebook, Skype, etc) and Web 3.0 (the semantic web where the focus is on the individual).It is crazy really. Like come on, the web has progressed so much that is knows exactly what to advertise for me? seems kind of creepy. I thought I would test this, so I opened my Facebook page and looked at the advertisements along the side. And to my surprise, there was all my favourite things - shoes, clothes, sales (the web knows me way too well). I would like to thank web 3.0 on effectively descending the funds in my bank account significantly.
So now that we had gone online, what was going to happen to 'offline'? Did anyone really care that we were saying goodbye to our loyal forms of mass communication, being newspapers, magazines, the radio and television? I cared. I love television reporting and magazine clippings and seeing my friends in the local newspaper. I definitely am not ready to say goodbye, but having it free is so much better (especially whilst living on a university student budget).
To be perfectly honest, this cartoon sums up what I look from today's lecture.
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