Essay about New Media, Democracy and Participation

The media’s job is to entertain, inform, and educate society on what is going on around the world. The media entertains society by reporting stories that amuse people. The educational function of the media is about allowing society to know their legal rights. The informational aspect of the media does not need to be explained; it is self-explanatory. Within the last three decades, the media’s role has changed dramatically. The media went from using telegraphs, post offices, newspapers, magazines, radio, and television to using cell phones and tablets. In the modern era, which is also sometimes referred to as the information age, global networking and global communication have shaped modern societies. The majority of

To begin with, globalization has furthered accessibility(SA1) to other groups and causes in many way. In Ariela Garvett essay “Tweets and Transitions: How the Arab Spring Reaffirms the Internet’s Democratizing Potential” Garvett argues that “as reflected in the recent political upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East, the internet is a potentially egalitarian and boundary-less structure...(174)

The internet has become a popular source used by society of a worldwide computer network that provides a variety of information and communication facilities allowing individuals to communicate with one another easily. The internet it self has brought people together but has changed the way people interact with each other, created isolation, some addiction and being unsafe. Nowadays, anything can be shared to the wide world through any device that is able to connect to the internet; where this can lead to what Charles Seife terms as “no privacy” in his article, “The Loneliness of the Interconnected.” According to Seife, the Internet’s vast interconnectivity made it possible for everyone to hear everyone else - and to be heard by everyone else.

Over the past few decades our generation has witnessed a communication revolution no generation has ever witnessed before. The Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. by mid-1990s and instant communication including the World Wide Web, email, and instant messaging have all played part of an enormous impact on media, commerce, and politics during that time and up until now. U.S. scholar and activist Robert McChesney has spent the past twenty years studying and documenting the effects of this Internet revolution and its relationship with capitalism and democracy. In his 2013 work “Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy,” McChesney addresses the relationship between the economic power and the digital

The media has never had the extreme omnipresence it had during the most recent federal elections. For more and more people the media is becoming something habitual, and politicians were among the first to take advantage of this fact. Be it a parties usage of online social platforms, 24-hour news broadcasting stations, or circa the 1800s printed word, there is no doubt the typical citizen feels connected in some regards to this mass of media. With most third-party communication technologies surfacing within the recent decades, the general affect on citizens ' lives is not fully understood. This connection is immense and complex, but it can

Delving deep into the history of how new media has the ability to cause the autocratic ways of governments to run into a stone wall, the infamous incident of how university students of Indonesia leveraged on the power of e-mail to overthrow the then corrupt President Suharto presents itself as an excellent illustration. Through examining more recent cases where the citizens of Tunisia and Egypt have tapped on the power of social media to help upend the existing political order, the potency of new media becomes apparent.

(Felczak et al, 2009). These rights include unfettered access to information and knowledge and the free exchange of ideas in the public sphere where everyone may participate in a mutually accountable debate, exchange of reasons, and opinions. (Habermas, 2004). In the 21st Century, the Internet has facilitated the equal opportunity for all participants to share information in a highly flexible environment. While the design of the Internet was to exist as a cooperative, non-hierarchal, communicative system for information sharing, it seamlessly developed into an extension of the public sphere. However, the advent of this new version of the public sphere came with a dark side of anonymity as exampled in the phenomena of

Theorists contend that representative government is headed for direct democracy by way of the Internet. Essentially what will happen is that representatives will no longer be needed because citizens will be able to use the Internet to make decisions. Grossman contends that “the more power [citizens] have to control their government and to involve themselves in making its decisions, the better” (41). Over the years citizens have been obtaining information through the media, newspapers, and other forms of mass media. The issues that arise with obtaining information through these sources are that the government can easily censor them. With the Internet comes “vastly expanded capacities for data collection, for computation, and for automation” (Kamark & Nye 22).

This essay explores the different relationships between social media platforms and the government to provide insight into the different ways the government uses media masses to further their agendas and how its good business is used for political gain. This essay also discusses the different ideologies and fallacies individuals have of the media’s role in society. This essay wasn’t written to persuade one either way, but rather to bring the important relationship to light, so with better understanding people can make wiser decisions as voters, consumers or investors.

As a logical consequence, Postmes and Brunsting (2002) reasoned that the Internet is changing society because people's cognitive processes, triggered by access to information and communication, replace the strong social ties that traditionally underpin committed activism. In simpler words, in the past, humanity used the herd instinct as the main driving force behind committed forms of activism. Thanks to the Internet, we climb another step or three on the evolutionary ladder, and simply do away with the herd instinct and replace it with reason. The argument, if put this way, does not sound particularly strong. What can be taken away is that social media is still evolving, that social media changes the way we – or most of us communicate, that social media is used in social and political activism, and that the Internet increases quantitative if not qualitative access to information.

In his article, The Mediatisation of Society Theory, Hjarvard (2008) deduces that media simultaneously become an integrated part of society, not to mention the existence of new media like the Internet. In fact, this integration of Internet into our daily life has made us live in the digital age where information is shared in real time and in global context. Castells (2007) even argues that in this digital age, people are able to expand their local communication activities to

No one can deny the fact that media is the most powerful tool of communication? Communication and interaction are the constitutive parts of everyday life. Our morning starts with the news that we get from morning newspaper, radio or television. Every generation the developer has a plan to improve media. In the modern world, people consider media as one of the most requirements that people can’t dispense from it. Media is everything, and the world seems to be nothing without it. It is difficult to imagine how people get to know some important news without newspapers, magazines, internet, and radio. Everybody a lot of methods helps him to collect the information. This paper is about defining types of media and their differences, defining the important role that media played, and determining the advantages of media.

Old media like broadcasting, print, and film created a consumer culture in the public. Participants would consume the media they could find, and that was the extent of their engagement with a piece of media. But during the digital age, participatory culture has exploded. Participatory culture is a concept coined by Henry Jenkins where consumers take part in both the consumption and the production of media. The advent of computers facilitates a low barrier of entry for creation of digital media and its propagation. With the availability of personal computers and consumer level software to manipulate media as well as the popularity of the internet to spread content, fans have become more engaged with the media they consume. In turn, participants can create forms of that media that comment and expand upon the original content. Participants who used to only consume media now have the avenues to become producers of media. In this essay, I will explore participatory culture through the lense of Lev Manovich’s Five Principles of New Media: Numerical Representation, Modularity, Automation, Variability, and Transcoding.

With the development of the Web 2.0 which made Internet participative, the Internet users are now capable of expressing themselves, interacting, and giving their opinion onto everything (products, services, brands, companies, cultural property) and on everybody, via multiple platforms on Internet. To criticize a restaurant on Cityvox, to note a seller on eBay, to denounce the actions of a brand or a company via a viral video on YouTube, to support a candidate for an election, to

How much does your vote really count? As a voter, does your choice really matter? How much influence does the media have on your vote? How many choices does the media actually make when it comes to our nation's leadership? These are questions pondered by both political scientists and the average American citizen each year as the second Tuesday in November approaches. Though we know that the framers founded this nation on the principles of representing it's citizens, and on the ideals of a nation for the people and by the people; it is obvious that the people feel that their vote doesn't always count. In this paper I plan to expand on these questions and the justifications behind asking them, and I plan to follow up with a specific