Key Sociologists - New Media

Cornford & Robins

New media developments are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary

• technology built on existing technology rather than being completely revolutionary

Boyle & Haynes

New media has added what was available from old media rather than replacing it

Curran & Seaton

• Neophiliacs - people positive about the benefits of the media

• Cultural pessimists - people who are critical about the new media

Keen

New media’s democracy makes it

• uncensored freedom of new media can be seen as an opportunity or danger (or both)

Li & Kirkup

Studied the use of the internet by Chinese and British students, found two global gender-based cultures. Men were more likely:

• More likely to have a positive attitudes toward the internet

• More likely to be self-confident about their skills using it

• More likely to use emails and chat rooms and play computer games

• Less likely to use it for studying

Jones

Social class also has an impact on new media

• poorest social classes have the least access to the internet

• 16 to 24-year-ods from disadvantaged backgrounds were relatively infrequent users of the internet

McLuhan

The world becomes a global village - people from all over the world can easily to talk to each other and share ideas

• new media promotes culture identity

• blurs the boundaries between the local and the global meaning different people and cultures are brought together

McNair

“Information, like knowledge, is power”

Boyle

Inequality in New Media - Age

• younger people who have grown up with the internet at home, at school and from their peers, and are consequently more media-savvy than previous generations

• Digital Natives: brought up in the digital era, more likely to consume media through a variety of formats; 10x more likely to go online via their mobile than those aged 55+

Livingstone & Wang

Inequality in New Media - Social Class

Suggests that this situation may be worsening as they found progress in gaining digital skills had stopped improving

• normal part of life that those who lack access, or the skills and confidence to use it experience a form of exclusion

MacKinnon

‘sovereigns of cyberspace’ to describe the power of giant multinational cooperation’s - now hold a kind of power over us that was once held only by governments, effectively part of our political system

• some undemocratic, repressive regimes (China & Iran), monitor and control new media use

Preston

digital media offer consumer choice of what they want to read or look at, don’t bring attention to stories that people didn’t know they wanted to be information about

Barnett & Seymour & Curran et al

poorer-quality content, ‘dumbing-down’ and tabloidisation of popular culture is used to attract a larger audience

Jenkins

Participatory Culture - Interactivity

• refers to the ways in which people process and share information or how they communicate with each other