DMD C2 Discovering Media in the Digital Age Notes

Fundamental Shift to a New Media Environment

Topics and Structure of the Lesson

• New media environment

• Media economics

• Media ownership

• Mass production

• Mass distribution

Learning Outcomes

• Discuss the characteristics of new media.

• Recognize how trends alter the content of different media, their economics, and industrial structures.

• Develop a sense of how the mass communication process has shifted in the new media environment.

What is New Media?

• New media refers to emerging information and communication technologies like mobile phones, the Internet, streaming technologies, wireless networks, and high-quality publishing and information-sharing capacities of the World Wide Web.

• New media are simultaneously integrated, interactive, and use digital code. Integration, interactivity, and digitalization must all be present for a medium to qualify as a part of the new media.

Defining Social Media Environment

• Social media environment refers to:

  • Activities, practices, and behaviors among communities who gather online to share information, knowledge, and opinions using conversational media.

  • Conversational media are web-based applications that make it possible to create and easily transmit content in the form of words, pictures, videos, and audios (Safko & Brake, 2009, p. 6).

• Social media refers to “the websites and online tools that facilitate interactions between users by providing them opportunities to share information, opinions, and interest” (Swar and Hameed, 2017, p. 141).

• Individuals use social media for many reasons, including entertainment, communication, and searching for information (Ostic, Qalati, Barbosa, Muhammad Shah, Vela, Herzallah and Liu 2021).

Characteristics of New Media

New Media is characterized by interactivity, instant access to information, and user-generated content, fostering engagement and communication among its users.

• The creation of new textual experiences. includes the integration of multimedia elements such as text, images, audio, and video, which enhances user engagement and promotes greater interactivity.

• The arrival of new ways of representing the world.

• The development of new relationships between subjects (both users and consumers) and media technologies. This shift fosters a more participatory culture, where individuals can contribute to content creation and share their perspectives across various platforms.

• The creation of new experiences of the relationship between embodiment, identity, and community.

• New conception of the biological body’s relationship to technology and media.

• The development of new patterns of organization and production.

• Communication

• Collaboration

• Convergence

• Creativity

• Community

• New media demands readers to interact/comment/post their reviews/opinions online.

• There is a factor of engagement in the whole communication process, which is two-way and interactive in nature.

• Communication through new media can be categorized as collaborative, networked, and unidirectional.

• Blogs allow users to publish content on their own web pages, serving as an alternative web-technology communication method for transmitting information to a large group audience.

• New media fosters a sense of community. Examples include Skype, Facebook, Yahoo groups, Usenet, Webkinz, and YouTube.

• (creativity) Users can create and edit videos, post blogs, post reviews/comments on blog posts, post reviews for products/services offered by brands, and create content on wikis.

• People not only read, listen to, or view content online but also edit, comment, and post feedback.

• New media technologies are known for their convergence with media.

Industrial Age vs. Digital Age

New Media Environment

• New media communications includes websites, chat rooms, bulletin board services, email list servers, social networking, and video-sharing platforms.

• New media, also called digital media, consists of methods that are mostly online or involve the Internet.

• Methods include:

  • Search engine optimization

  • Pay-per-click advertising

  • Content marketing

  • Social media

  • Email marketing

Media Economics

• Media economics combines the study of economics with the study of media.

• It is concerned with the changing economic forces that direct and constrain the choices of managers, practitioners, and other decision-makers across the media.

• Albarran’s definition focuses on how media industries use scarce resources to produce content to satisfy various wants and needs (1996: 5).

• Media economics is concerned with issues including international trade, business strategy, pricing policies, competition, and industrial concentration as they affect media firms and industries.

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) represents the sum of the value of all goods and services produced within the economy over a particular period, usually a year.

  • Media goods and services represent a small but growing proportion of total economic activity in developed countries.

  • In the United Kingdom (UK), they account for some 3–5 per cent of GDP.

• Media entrepreneurship is based on an idea that is based on recognized opportunity.

• Innovation is an integral part of media entrepreneurship, but in many cases an imitative innovation and implementation of a successfully tested innovation uses for a new market or application.

• SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MEDIA PRODUCTS

  • Media products are characterized by a high front-investment, with high risk of failure from lack of interest, as consumer traction is difficult to test for before the actual release, distribution and marketing of the product.

  • Attention scarcity is a challenge for business in general but especially so for media businesses.

• Mainstream media economics literature considers media products to have high fixed costs, however Bourreau, Gensollen and Perani argue media products costs to be variable, with a positive correlation between increased production cost and audience traction (2002), pointing to large-budget Hollywood productions.

• Areas of Focus

  • Media economics involves the application of economic theories, concepts and principles to study mass media companies and industries.

  • There have been three main areas of research focus: macroeconomics, microeconomics and the political economy (critical) tradition.

Macroeconomics

• Macroeconomics examines the whole economic system and is primarily studied at a national level.

• Macroeconomics includes topics such as economic growth indices, public policies toward the economy, and national production and consumption.

Microeconomics

• Microeconomics centers on the activities of specific components of the economic system, such as individual markets, firms, or consumers.

• Microeconomics tends to focus on market structure, conduct, and behavior.

• Must accommodate for and expand upon the emerging trends of:

  • attention economy

  • crossmedia distribution

  • artists taking a stronger role in their own economic well-being.

• Albarran and Arrese already focus on the role of time from a consumer, producer, and advertiser perspective (2009).

What is so special about the economics of the media?

• Many media organizations comply with the classical theory of the firm and, like commercial entities in any other industry, are primarily geared towards maximizing profits and satisfying shareholders.

• A good number, however, appear to be driven by alternative motives.

• The two commodities that media firms generate are, first, content (television programmes, newspaper copy, magazine articles, etc.) and, second, audiences.

• The entertainment or news content that listeners, viewers or readers ‘consume’ constitutes one form of output which media firms can sell.

• The audiences that have been attracted by this content constitute a second valuable output, in so far as access to audiences can be packaged, priced and sold to advertisers.

• Audiences are the main currency for many media companies, as these provide advertising revenue.

Economies of Scope

• These are achieved through the repackaging of content for new media products, achieved by companies large enough to have accumulated an archive of assets that can be incorporated into new products, thus saving costs.

• This applies also to repackaging content for a foreign market or repurposing content for a different use, such as a television show on traffic safety created for distribution on national free television but later repurposed as content for showing inside an educational game used in primary education.

• Another example is the practice or remaking old Hollywood movies with modern technology. With the studio already holding rights to the screenplay and an existing awareness of the story bringing a built-in audience, economies of scope can be achieved. By diversification into similar products, economies of scope save from the higher costs of original production.

Traditional Media Shifted to New Media

• Motion pictures have moved out of the confines of theatres to that most powerful networking site, i.e. YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo etc.

• New Media in short has transformed the mass media from a one-way street into what can only be described as a multiway-street in which the rules are yet to be crystallized.

• New media--- More on User Generated Content.

• Traditional Media---Content generation is only looked after by media houses.

• Nowadays, anyone can be editor, reporter, publisher advertiser etc.

Media Ownership

• Ownership is an important factor for media corporations.

• The issue of property ownership is of vital importance, especially in terms of media independence and broadcasting policies.

• In media ownership, which is commonly observed in the world, the control of individuals and organizations is dominated by large multinational conglomerates.

• For this reason, there is a cross-integration of media ownership.

• All media, whether it is film, music or print, is owned by a company.

• They hold the rights to publish, distribute and manipulate their work.

• For example: Warner Bros won DC comics, and therefore own the “rights” to all of the characters in the “DC Universe”.

• Key Issues:

  • Piracy

  • The dominance of Hollywood over the industry

  • The destruction of the UK Film Council.

Piracy

• Illegal distribution of media without the permission of its owner.

• Example: downloading, Pirate DVDs

• Advances in digital technology have made piracy easier, cheaper, and has improved the quality of the content.

• Electronic files can be leaked in advance of a film release.

• Internet allows pirate material to be distributed all over the world very quickly.

• Digital camera and sounds equipment used in cinemas to record pirate copies of a film have improved greatly in quality.

• Media ownership is sometimes seen as a simple reflection of political conditions: dictatorships or authoritarian regimes control the media directly, while democracies allow pluralism of ownership.

• The structure of ownership is also likely to have a bearing on questions such as how far political advertising is permitted during elections.

Understanding Digital Media Communication