reaction paper 8

In Chapter 7, the author demonstrates how the emergence of the internet and mobile telecommunications have accelerated the growth of international communication.

With the internet being by far the fastest-growing media industry, the increasingly reduced cost of use and the huge potential for revenue, media corporations are more and more reliant on electronic media, if not completely. Statistics going back almost 20 years ago show that sales were already dramatically increasing online back in 1999, with websites such as Amazon.com making $610 million dollars that year.

Media companies’ response to internet growth is to develop strategies of immersion into the “connected” world. One example is the creation of an “Internet-based media giant valued at around $350 billion”, the result of a merger between America Online and Time Warner. The merger was meant to bring together a diverse range of content, ranging from television, music, news broadcast to radio and other industries into one accessible platform, and perfectly represented the value of the internet as a content and service provider.

It is undeniable that the internet has taken over our world, and that the media industry is slowly moving away from the “traditional” to the digital world. This is especially happening in the news industry.

 I think it is a very positive thing, as the internet is one of the cheapest and most accessible platforms that allows people not only to have access to knowledge and information, but to have that knowledge come from a variety of different sources and from international perspectives rather than just a national one. As much as media platforms try to be objective, newspapers and television broadcasts remain mostly a one-way information flow, but the internet allows for people to do their own research and open up their minds to other viewpoints. It has also allowed for people to have a platform to express themselves and to relay the things that are happening around them, which means a much bigger flow of information.

However, the internet has also paved the way for a much greater amount of propaganda and of unverified and biased information to pass around freely and without restrictions or fact-checking. In a climate of fear-mongering and seemingly never-ending tragedies, these “news” are very much believed and have a huge influence on how people see the world, and as we have seen, can even change the course of elections as important as that of the president of the United States.

This trend has also been a death sentence for many media platforms, as the increase of online services and the easy accessibility have led people to stop purchasing traditional services, which is why many newspapers have had to shut down due to lack of funding and increasingly lower subscriber counts. But it is simply a part of the evolution of life and technology, and all platforms have to adapt if they want to survive.