Digital media have in many ways changed how we consume media products’ who do you think benefits the most- audiences or producers?

‘Digital media have in many ways changed how we consume media products’ who do you think benefits the most- audiences or producers?

Digital media has revolutionised the way audiences and producers consume news through various ways like citizen journalism and crowdsourcing which provides a pluralistic model for audiences as the audience play an active role in providing information for producers. This leads onto UGC (user generated content) which is how social networking sites work such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter which are the texts I’ve been focusing on for my case study.

Facebook which started in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg is a social networking site that over took MySpace which was created in 2003.Myspace was targeted at 16+ originally but Facebook was the new phenomenon as there was more interactivity compared to Facebook. This is down to UGC reasons like pictures, videos, fanpages and applications that target a wide age range e.g. Farmville. Due to all the content available on Facebook that MySpace didn’t have they changed their route and decided to target young artists promoting their musical abilities. This allows more business opportunities for people to artists under their record as well as entertaining the public. Similarly Facebook’s audience has changed from university students to teenagers from 13+.

Social networking sites have isolated us from ‘real human interaction in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.’ This is pointed out by Sherry Turkle’s article in the Guardian which would disadvantage the reputatio0n of social netowrking sites. This is because people spend less time interacting in personas statistics shows that 57% of people talk more online than face to face as they’ve become dependent on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. So it could suggest that ‘technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human’.

According to research on social networks from Harvard professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski woman have twice as photos and tags updated than men and he found that guys preferred girls with pictures and girls preferred girls with pictures. Real life example of fb suicide was Simone Back, she posted a status saying ‘took all my pills be dead soon so bye bye everyone’ and none of her 1082 facebook friends helped her. This hints at the problems with social networking sites like being hacked and having fake friends. Facebook makes money by targeted advertising s they store information about what a certain user likes and has adverts of similar styles increasing their likelihood of gaining profit.

Twitter created by Jack Dorsey in 2006 is mostly used by celebrities where fans can follow them and get constant updates by accessing the site through phones which is convergence. Research shows there is an estimated 50 million tweets per day but pear analytics analysed 2000 tweets from the US and UK and found that: 40% of tweets were pointless babble, 38% conversational, 9%pass along value, 6% self promotion, 4% of spam and 4% of news. The figure of the news retrieved from social networking sites is lower compared to Facebook as 48% of Americans said they find out about news on Facebook. These social networking sites are available in different languages as a result of globalisation.

Google Realtime has a negative effect on twitter as they lose out more users as people can view content from social networking sites without being signed up. The issues of social networking sites is that you cant trust whos behind the screen and who has access to viewing your personal information and its easy for paedophiles to groom young children. As well as identity fraud which might happen on Twitter as people make fake accounts to create bad publicity.
UGC has replaced old forms of media like newspapers and letters. Although celebs mainly use Twitter and have followers on their there are other forms of accessing celebrity gossip such as digital spy.

Overall I think digital media has definitely impacted how audiences consume media as there is a pluralistic model which has allowed there to be choice over if audiences are active or passive. For instance citzen journalism put the audience in the position to share with the public as well as producers which leads to crowdsourcing. Although the constant changes to technologies might lead to a whole new revolution as this happened with MySpace which was overtook by Facebook.