Impacts of New Media

New media refers to modes of communication centring around dissemination of information through digital means, incorporating computer-based and/or Internet-based technologies, e.g. blogs, podcasts, apps, online newspapers, livestreaming, etc. It’s close association to advancements in technology like the Internet differentiates it from ‘older’ forms of media like radio, TV, print media, etc., thus the name. It can also be described as an interplay between technology, images and sound. Interestingly, new media continues to remain “new” as technology keeps on advancing, e.g. once CDs and DVDs were considered the epitome of video technology, now losing relevance due to the onset of streaming platforms like Netflix.

Six major characteristics of new media separate it from so-called "old", or traditional media. These are

• Digital/convergent
• Interactive
• Hypertextual
• Globally networked
• Virtual
• Simulated

As a result of these characteristics, individuals, and as an extension society itself has undergone many changes.

Digitization, or the process of information getting converted into binary code, has led to a great paradigm shift. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks. Huge amounts of printed, “hard” information now take just a few megabytes, resulting in a considerable amount of information getting stored in something as small as an SD card, with the information accessible via a mobile phone. With all these technologies being more commonplace and economically viable, access to all sorts of information has become easier to a drastic degree. It has led to a revolution in academia, where both students and teachers can access top-notch educational material, with a notable amount of it being free of cost, allowing economically disadvantaged people to get past the rigid and exclusionary barriers of academia to a certain degree, in a way democratizing education.

Greater access to information results in even more democratization; journalists can access important government information and write stories which would’ve been laden with barriers and hurdles in the print media era. The same stories can be broadcast to a large range of viewers, who can access that information anywhere, anytime, and can lead to great socio-political changes, e.g. Arab Spring.

However, this ease of access extends to government organizations and corporate firms, which has led to concerning developments. With all sorts of data like personal information (name, contact details, age, gender, income, social status), passwords, bank details, searches, interests, location, etc available on the Net, both government and commercial organizations have exploited those for their benefit; rampant surveillance has propped up in multiple nations, severely violating the right to privacy of the masses, with many controversial incidents focusing on wiretapping, e.g. PRISM, an Obama-era surveillance program. Corporates pay hefty funds to get access to information about their demographics, including income, interests, socio-economic status, preferences, etc. in order to create an effective marketing and selling strategy. However, this has resulted in almost all websites funnelling information of their users to these corporations, another serious violation of their privacy. The Cambridge Analytica controversy recently put this in light.

This greater access to information has also resulted in arguably negative consequences from the consumers side as well. Anyone can access the library of assets and content on the Internet which is largely free of cost, allowing for the barrier of content creation to be lowered massively. This culminates into a peculiar situation; while the quantity of content has increased exponentially, the quality has taken a hit, lending the Internet an image of an information ‘landfill’, from which valuable content has to be filtered out. However, it should be noted that new media has also allowed for a ‘collective intelligence’, i.e., people are allowed to share and combine resources, data, skills and information for any given purpose. Video-sharing platforms like YouTube allow people to teach other users to make better content and get better accustomed to new technologies, with the consequence being better content. This tutoring culture extends beyond just content creation, but also includes education of nearly all levels, socio-political awareness, all of which leading to great cultural shifts.

New media interactivity has allowed for a new form of freedom and facility to consumers, where people can engage and interact with the media as active audiences, customise it, and produce their own content. However, when talking about social media, interactivity, i.e. sharing, retweeting, etc. has resulted in the concept of ‘virality’, which refers to content spreading across the Internet landscape at a frighteningly rapid pace worldwide. Regular users are thrown into the spotlight, earning their “15 minutes of fame”. Virality happens at a nexus of various factors like the algorithms at play and sometimes even plain luck. However this hasn’t stopped people from forcing their content to be viral, vying for those 15 minutes of fame, resulting in most content often appearing as rather similar. Corporations also try to capitalize on these trends, resulting in mass culture like movies, music, books, etc being shaped in a similar, profitable mould, furthering the “cultural industry” phenomenon as described by Adorno.

Multimediality in new media has resulted in almost all websites capable of containing text, images, audio, video and interactive elements all at the same place, at the same time. This facilitates an expansive, advanced and more intuitive dissemination and reception of information, allowing for a greater degree of expression. Educational platforms can teach users about a concept using text, audiovisual demonstration of that concept, along with interactive programs allowing users to conduct, say, experiments that might not be feasible to conduct in school laboratories. However multimediality has become yet another area of capitalization, with advertisements of all sorts littering nearly all websites, which can often become overwhelming to the senses. This has created an “information overload”, where people are surrounded by content all times of the day everywhere.

The facilities provided by new media has allowed for great things to be done, but such great power has been exploited as well, allowing for rampant malicious practices which are difficult to tackle by authorities. Harassment on social media has always been one of the foremost points of criticism towards those platforms, with perpetrators moving away from just verbal harassment to practices like doxing, where the residential address of a user is spread wide across against their consent, leaking private information including pictures, videos, passwords, etc.