New media – even in the form of today’s rudimentary internet – is opening up a new way of communicating that we just cannot ignore. Gitanjali Diwan reports.
We may hold very different ideas about the nature of society, communication and technological media but it would not take long for most of us to agree that communication media are pervasive features of modern everyday life.
From newspapers to television, and from telephones to pagers, we are always surrounded by a vast number of media sources.
Today, the rise of new media, headed by the internet, is beginning to contribute significantly to the complexity of these channels of communication. At present the information superhighway largely remains to be constructed, but rudimentary digital communication networks, like the internet, are changing the media landscape.
Organizations of all shapes and sizes are rushing to get up to speed on the much-vaunted superhighway. Many view the internet as the network of information networks and as the communications medium of the future. More and more public relations firms are becoming “cyber heroes” by mastering new technologies to better serve their clients.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates notes: “This industry will be changing the way people do business, the way they learn and even the way they entertain themselves, far more than I think people outside the industry expect.”
Some assert computer communication will undermine the monopoly power of media giants, opening a new era of more egalitarian and democratic communication. More and more people are turning to the internet as an everyday tool and research shows computers have been adopted as a way of life, especially for the youth culture.
The arrival of the digital age has involved radical social, as well as technological changes.
In addition to broadening the effective reach of the marketplace, cyberspace is making feasible, the “deepening of the market”, both for commercial home entertainment and for education. Compared to the rise of other electronic media, the internet has expanded at a phenomenal rate, integrating various modes of conventional communication, including radio and television, into a vast interactive network.
It has opened up new opportunities for dialogue and deliberation, empowering people to make things happen rather than have things happen to them.
Thus the PR world has to embrace these ‘new media’ outlets and consider them just as important as our previous “mediators”.
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