Case Study - Step 3

Step Three: Choosing individual topic area and relevant theorists

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Write here what your case study will involve.  Remember it should be about the impact of new and digital media on.......

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Chat sites/ messengers : such as MSN, Yahoo , Skype , BBM and Whatsapp

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Explain why you have chosen this topic and why you think this will be a rich area for study.

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The moving of platforms ... from computers to smart phones
Phone companies loosing out... the disruption of new and digital technology on traditional
Companies now having to change and adapt method e.g : MSN buying Skype

The negative outcomes of messengers over the past years : e.g : BBM= riots, cyber bullying etc
The access advantage due to wifi- BT etc. - in comparison to traditional ways of communicating.

Social Networking Chats - FB Chat
Whatsapp = cross platform messaging application for all smartphones unlike services such as BBM or iOS

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Identify at least three media texts/ products that you will use as your primary sources of evidence to demonstrate the impact of new and digital media in your topic area.  

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PLATFORM:
E-media:
1) Skype -2003 2) BBM-2011
3) Whatsapp-2011

 THEORISTS :

UGC- citizen journalists
Web 2.0 - interactivity

The digital haves/have nots
Capitalism
4G- Wifi 
Pluralism

What is the message of 'Black Mirror: The National Anthem?'

What is the message of 'Black Mirror: The National Anthem?'

The Black mirror can be said to have many messages but most importantly it shows how society is being debased through the desensitisation of content as there is now less privacy and less censorship therefore the audience are loosing their values, the ability to interact and spread content fast as possible for example on Twitter , it also allows the lack of censorship as once something is on the internet it can instantly get spread virally, thus perhaps we are living in a dystopia due to technology rather than utopia. It also shows the disruptive nature of traditional media as new/ digital media is slowly taking over through the technology of smart phones, interactivity of social networking and the citizen journalism through UGC . Moreover it presents political affairs in a satire way to show the debasing of society who only watched the events that mock people or entertain themselves. It also shows the strong belief that society has on Rolling 24 hour news to present the real news , as internet news could be untrue and false rumours therefore many rely on broadcasting services to present the truth.

Why US Favour Paywalls

Eleven of the country's largest-selling 20 newspapers are either charging for access or have announced plans to do so

Paywalls are becoming increasingly prevalent at newspaper websites across the United States.

Gannett, the largest US chain, expanded its paywall to almost all of its 80 groups over the last 12 months


More than 35% of US newspaper readers are regularly discovering some restrictions in their online surfing,
Most papers allow visitors to access several articles for free before hitting a wall. This so-called "metered model" is the most popular form of charging.


In 2012, all of the major Canadian newspaper publishers also decided to throw in their lot with the paywall crowd


Critics complain that the Times, and other papers, could make more from advertising if they didn't have a paywall, because far more readers would read far more content.

But a Globe & Mail writer argues  that the price of static online ads, which appear on most news sites, has been falling for years. This makes it difficult for them to fund journalistic content.


Washington Post's chief executive, Donald Graham,
He said: "The reason we haven't adopted [a paywall] yet is that we haven't found one that actually adds to profits. But we are going to continue to study every model of paywall and think about that, as well as think about keeping it free."

The figures show the print-online relationship is more complicated than the prophets of digital revolution assume

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/dec/30/writing-on-paywall-end-of-print


The Latest ABC print circulation returns.
The Telegraph, the Guardian and many of the rest are down overall between 8% and 10% year-on-year:
but their websites – with the Daily Mail breaking 7 million unique browsers a day and other rises jostling behind – go soaring ever higher.

One is the magazine world, both UK and in the US.
It ought to be collapsing, wrecked by the move to the tablets, which fit existing magazine page sizes for the transition

But, in fact, the rate of decline in magazine purchasing is relatively small, with subscriptions holding up staunchly and advertising remarkably solid

Teenage lifestyle magazines were up 54% in 12 months, children's pre-school mags had an 11.9% rise, and women's slimming titles showed a 10% jump.


Already 360 US papers – including most of the biggest and best – have built paywalls around their products
The new fashion is erecting slightly porous paywalls, on the New York Times model – and the Washington Post may be coming to the same conclusion.

Donald Graham, the supreme boss at the Post, gives an interesting hint why it's taken so long to get a paywall. Washington Post is only available around DC, he points out, while the New York Times covers the country from numerous satellite print sites, which are, counter-intuitively, one reason for its paywall recruitment success.


The latest National Readership Survey figures and you'll find 2,493,000 people aged between 15 and 35 following the Sun, 1,039,000 reading the Mirror, and 354,000 and 330,000 Guardian and Times followers respectively. Even the Telegraph manages 188,000 voices of youth.




 

Newsweek unveils final print edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-20837502

 The 80-year-old US current affairs magazine "Newsweek" has revealed the image that will grace the cover of its last-ever print edition

A black and white photo of the publication's Manhattan headquarters #lastprintissue.
the hashtag to Twitter is regarded as a backhanded compliment.

The death of the print edition was caused by falling advertising revenues, as audiences moved online.

From the new year, Newsweek will be a digital-only publication. Editor Tina Brown described it as "a new chapter" for the magazine

Newsweek's first edition was published on 17 February, 1933. It made an immediate splash with its front cover, featuring seven photos - one news story for each day of the week.

It gained prominence in the 1960s for its coverage of the civil rights movement

The move to a digital edition will allow 'Newsweek' to cut costs such as printing, postage and distribution.
However it will lose money from print advertisers, who traditionally pay more than their online counterparts.

Will the internet end up controlled by big business and politicians?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/23/internet-will-oligarchs-control-it

 Ever since the internet burst into public consciousness in 1993, the big question has been whether the most disruptive communications technology since print would be captured by the established power structures –  and giant corporations – that dominate our world and shape its development.

But because the ITU is a UN body on which every member country has a vote, some regimes construed the conference as an opportunity for enabling governments to begin getting a grip on controlling the net.

motives for doing so varied: some countries saw revised IT regulations as a way of enabling them to levy charges on the giant western companies that currently dominate the net

The underlying reality was that most western countries simply refused to buy into the agendas of the authoritarian and/or developing countries who sought to use the conference as a means to the ends that they desired.

-->>> Instagram, a photo-sharing service that Facebook recently acquired for an unconscionable sum, abruptly changed its terms and conditions

users of the service were required to agree that Instagram could use any or all of their photographs for advertising and other purposes, at its sole discretion.

 Most people saw this as just another illustration of the old internet adage: if the service is free then you are the product.

Others saw it as evidence that Facebook is determined to "monetise" its billion-plus users in any way it can.
But however one interprets it, the inescapable fact is that it demonstrates the extent to which giant internet corporations will try to control their users.


And Facebook is a giant corporation in a way that we haven't seen before. It has over a billion customers, er, users. That's just under half of all the world's internet population.

During a coffee break at a Royal Society conference, I mentioned this to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web.
"That's nothing," he said. "There are probably 200 million people now who think that Facebook is the internet." Multiply that number by four or five and you have the current position.


John Perry Barlow, the lyricist of the Grateful Dead, launched his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace with its stinging contempt for the established order.
"Governments of the Industrial World", it opened, loftily, "you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Barlow didn't recognise, that another gang of control freaks would also get in on the act – the Facebooks, Googles, Amazons and Apples of this world. And, in a way, they're making more progress than governments at the moment

Why power has two meanings on the internet

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/06/power-laws-internet-john-naughton

Pareto's Principle is a special example: a small number of people/sites/words/etc account for most of the action, with a "long tail" getting very little of it.
Thus, instead of most websites having an "average" number of inbound links, a very small number of sites (the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons of this world) have colossal numbers of links, while millions of sites have to make do with only a few.



Everywhere you look on the internet you find power laws – yes, even in the Guardian's online comment forums, where 20% of comments are provided by 0.0037 per cent of the paper's monthly online audience
 There are millions of blogs out there, a relatively small number of them attract most of the readership...................Various  explanations have been said  for this, but really it's just an illustration of the power of power law distributions


Clay Shirky once put it:
"In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome.
This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution".



When blogging went mainstream in the 90s, many people speculated that the net would expand what Jürgen Habermas called the
"public sphere", ie "an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action".



With the relentless consolidation of mass-media ownership in the hands of giant conglomerates, that public sphere had been steadily shrinking in the postwar era, with worrying implications for liberal democracy.



It seemed a racing certainty that a technology that enabled anyone to become a global publisher without having to kow-tow to editorial "gatekeepers" would change things for the better.

Fifteen years on, there are still grounds for optimism, but only if we can find a way of overcoming the tyranny of power laws.