"How far do you agree with the view that the move to online media has been entirely positive for the audience so far?"
In the past decade or so, every big business in the world has made a move to the Internet in order to keep up with the new competitive market. It started with Pizza Hut being the first business to offer online ordering in 1994 and since then the overwhelmingly vast majority of businesses have followed suit. Has it all been positive?
I would have to argue no, it hasn't all been positive, it's happened on too big a scale for everything to be beneficial to all audiences. For example, the move to online media posed a serious threat in particular to the music industry, from the second it was brought into existence. Piracy became a huge problem in 2000 with the creation of LimeWire, a peer-to-peer file sharing site used to download music for free. LimeWire wasn't a perfect site, most of the 'files' uploaded were actually malware, but it posed a big enough threat to the music industry because of what it represented; The Web was hardly ten years old and there was already a way to get music for free. A lot of people were willing to sacrifice the quality of the song for the price of it, and downloaded LimeWire rather than buy CDs. The retaliation of this was the creation of iTunes, Youtube and Spotify.
For a subscription fee, you can access nearly any song on Spotify. You can buy them on iTunes to support your favourite artists, or you can watch the music videos for free on Youtube, after you've watched the advertisement at the beginning of course. Legal, money making sites were set up because it became very clear very quickly that now the idea was out there, the concept of 'free music 24/7' couldn't be destroyed.
Even though these sites were created to protect music, it looks now as if they'll be the end of the music industry as we know it. Streaming sites have become the 'bane' of CDs, and, once again, free music sharing sites have appeared, only this time they're more legitimate, an example being Soundcloud.
Not unlike the risk posed to the music industry, printed newspapers like the Guardian have suffered heavily on loss of sales. In the last ten years, The Guardian's sales have halved, and the number keeps getting lower. People are far less likely to pay for newspapers when the news is free and available 24/7 on their phones. To combat this, The Guardian created a website counterpart to their newspaper, where every article and more is available, for free, on any platform. The website is incredibly popular, with nearly 37 million unique users per month.
For a subscription fee, you can access nearly any song on Spotify. You can buy them on iTunes to support your favourite artists, or you can watch the music videos for free on Youtube, after you've watched the advertisement at the beginning of course. Legal, money making sites were set up because it became very clear very quickly that now the idea was out there, the concept of 'free music 24/7' couldn't be destroyed.
Even though these sites were created to protect music, it looks now as if they'll be the end of the music industry as we know it. Streaming sites have become the 'bane' of CDs, and, once again, free music sharing sites have appeared, only this time they're more legitimate, an example being Soundcloud.
Not unlike the risk posed to the music industry, printed newspapers like the Guardian have suffered heavily on loss of sales. In the last ten years, The Guardian's sales have halved, and the number keeps getting lower. People are far less likely to pay for newspapers when the news is free and available 24/7 on their phones. To combat this, The Guardian created a website counterpart to their newspaper, where every article and more is available, for free, on any platform. The website is incredibly popular, with nearly 37 million unique users per month.
However, the loss of sales on their newspapers and the free nature of their websites meant that the organisation was losing too much money to stay afloat, so they now sell advertising space to other companies and ask for a donation from every viewer who opens a page. Other newspaper websites, like The Times have a hard paywall, and can only be accessed after a subscription, but have fewer advertisements. So while both businesses have managed to prevent themselves from going under, they've both had to drastically change their business techniques to do so.
Online media has been damaging to big corporations but beneficial to audiences in other ways too. The news can no longer be controlled by conglomerates, as anyone with a smart phone can upload anything and get millions of views any time in any place. The rise of 'citizen journalism', a phrase coined by Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media, has made sharing news and global events every person's 'duty'. While companies such as the BBC or Sky may find this distressing, the general public find it liberating - it's the reclaiming of the news. We live in an age marked by paranoia and the fear of 'fake news'. Arguably, having a huge influx of news from hundreds of sources means the odds of the average reader getting told something incorrect is higher, but people these days are far more suspicious of government funded broadcasters. Citizen journalism is prosumerism and participation at it's most volatile, why trust what you read in the newspapers when you can see what's actually happening in real time on Twitter?
Unsurprisingly, organisations like the BBC and CNN have found a way to cash in on citizen journalism, and offer payment for snippets of first hand footage of big events on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. So even if the move to online media initially looked like the end of the news as we know it, the big organisations still found a way to maintain their relevance, just as they did in the music industry.
Citizen journalism is only the tip of the iceberg in the growing 'Cult of the Amateur'. This refers to the rise of novices in any field (song writing, editing, animating, etc) posting their work online to millions of people. This definition comes from the media theorist Andrew Keen, and is largely used in a negative sense. He feels that the rapidly growing amount of poor quality content on the Internet is cheapening the work of professionals, and slowly working towards eliminating the phrase altogether. He says, "There are too many abrasive young men with personality defects and not enough accountable experts” on the web. Anyone can post anything. This doesn't mean it's any good, and a lot of it comes under hard scrutiny, which ultimately kills a lot of enthusiasm from novice creators, maybe even convincing them to give up completely.
While I understand his argument, I personally feel that this is a very hard view to take. For a lot of people, novice and experienced alike, the move to online media has been positive. It's a good way for professional artists to advertise their work and gain commissions, while less experienced creators can get inspiration and improve their own skills with ease. I don't see anything overly worrying about a lot of people having fun and sharing the things they've created, that's what the Web is for, after all. Yes, it must be frustrating for professionals to have their work bogged down by the hobbyists, but they're professionals, shouldn't they be able to take it in their stride?
Of course, everything we understand about online media could be about to change very soon. We could be looking at the end of Net Neutrality, which would have bumper effect on everything. The reason the Web has flourished over the past few decades is because it's been free. You pay a monthly fee to a broadband provider, but after that, everything you need is right there. Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Wikipedia - they're all free to use whenever you need them. With the end of Net Neutrality, an additional fee will have to be paid to use these. There will be an extra fee for social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, and then another fee for videos, such as Netflix and Youtube, and so on and so forth.
Unsurprisingly, organisations like the BBC and CNN have found a way to cash in on citizen journalism, and offer payment for snippets of first hand footage of big events on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. So even if the move to online media initially looked like the end of the news as we know it, the big organisations still found a way to maintain their relevance, just as they did in the music industry.
Citizen journalism is only the tip of the iceberg in the growing 'Cult of the Amateur'. This refers to the rise of novices in any field (song writing, editing, animating, etc) posting their work online to millions of people. This definition comes from the media theorist Andrew Keen, and is largely used in a negative sense. He feels that the rapidly growing amount of poor quality content on the Internet is cheapening the work of professionals, and slowly working towards eliminating the phrase altogether. He says, "There are too many abrasive young men with personality defects and not enough accountable experts” on the web. Anyone can post anything. This doesn't mean it's any good, and a lot of it comes under hard scrutiny, which ultimately kills a lot of enthusiasm from novice creators, maybe even convincing them to give up completely.
While I understand his argument, I personally feel that this is a very hard view to take. For a lot of people, novice and experienced alike, the move to online media has been positive. It's a good way for professional artists to advertise their work and gain commissions, while less experienced creators can get inspiration and improve their own skills with ease. I don't see anything overly worrying about a lot of people having fun and sharing the things they've created, that's what the Web is for, after all. Yes, it must be frustrating for professionals to have their work bogged down by the hobbyists, but they're professionals, shouldn't they be able to take it in their stride?
Of course, everything we understand about online media could be about to change very soon. We could be looking at the end of Net Neutrality, which would have bumper effect on everything. The reason the Web has flourished over the past few decades is because it's been free. You pay a monthly fee to a broadband provider, but after that, everything you need is right there. Google, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Wikipedia - they're all free to use whenever you need them. With the end of Net Neutrality, an additional fee will have to be paid to use these. There will be an extra fee for social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, and then another fee for videos, such as Netflix and Youtube, and so on and so forth.
If Net Neutrality comes to an end, this will effect the amount of people on the Web, and the amount of content being posted. This blatant money grab has caused outcry in countries all over the world, but it's not that surprising. Every time anything had sprung up that's free, in the news or in music or anywhere else, rival web sites have appeared, created by the big companies to claim back money. In Portugal, there is Net Neutrality is already gone, so it's not impossible. The companies that control the Internet only care about making money, that's been obvious since day one, so this stand-off was inevitable.
In conclusion, I don't think anyone could argue that the move to online media has been entirely positive for the audience. So much happens so quickly, sites and fads are here and gone in less than a day, that it's impossible to keep up with everything. The vast amount of free content has resulted in fat cats trying to take away all free content, which could impact how we use the Internet indefinitely. It's not all negative either, it's just all encompassing. Any change, minor or major, disrupts businesses and audience all over the world, and we can only try to keep up to date with it all.
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