PowerPoint Presentation Slide 1

New Media ( Chapter 8 in Text)

• Definition & the Information Revolution
• Changing economics
• Changing regulation
• Social Issues
• Social Challenges:
• The Knowledge Gap
• Surveillance and loss of privacy
• Sharing and Market “Hacktivism”

History of New Media

• Since 1970s, but especially 1990s, nations concerned with the “ information highway”
• Treated the Internet like an 1840s challenge of the telegraph
• Concern that to remain competitive in a global trading economy, nations needed to “wire up”
• Provide businesses, workers and consumers access to the Internet for education, retail, entertainment
• Frontier metaphors often used
• Essential for economic transformation away from industrial to service/ information economies: the so-called “innovation agenda”
• In Canada, wired telco/cable providers dominated agenda: wireless only now emerging

Building the Internet

• Nations regulate telecommunications internationally: agree on bandwidth of electronic transmission, spacing of satellites, sharing of costs/ interconnection
• Also develop technical standards for interconnection ( IP protocols such as MP3)
• This is the international standards role of nations, businesses and technical experts in creating a market for technology, and ensuring consumers don’t buy technology which will not work
• Business play a bigger and bigger role influencing this shadow world of standards: citizens underrepresented
• But: companies still need states to rule on standards

Definition of New Media

• Digital communication
• Used in the production, distribution and reception of communication
• Involves use of new communication networks: Internet as mass medium

Information Revolution

• Digitization: using computers to store,manipulate and transmit information in form of speech, text, data, and video more cheaply and faster than every before.
• Networking: distributed, fast digital networks wired and wireless
• Convergence: refers to merging of what were three separate industries: telecommunications, computing, and electronics or broadcasting