David Desprez - Information Superhighway

“Stop your whining,” my dad said as I sat slouched in a desk chair staring at a computer screen exasperated about having to do research for a 6th grade project. “You know, back when I was a kid we had to go to the library to do research and get information…you’ve got it easy with the internet” he explained. So I bit my lip, sucked it up, and did the research. I found everything I needed in no time at all. He was right, the internet made doing research very effortless. I am growing up in a different world than my parents. Throughout history, technological developments have altered cultures throughout the world. For example, cell phones forever changed the way that people communicate. Weapons technology redefined how wars were fought. At one point in history, the bow and arrow was the most advance weapon on the planet. However, today we have bombs that can wipe out entire civilizations. The evolution of different technologies has perpetually changed the way we live. In recent history, advancing technology fashioned a digital revolution, shifting the world in which my parents grew up. Infrastructural developments (including computers, video games, music players, the internet, etc.) have created many new mediums by which the media can provide the public with information. The internet continues to grow as one of these innovative and vigorously expanding mediums. Although the internet is not so much the new media, it remains a pioneering and intriguing vehicle by which people can now easily access information. Millions of people use the internet today, and its popularity continues to grow as the features of the internet remain limitless in terms of what one can do online. With massive popularity among the media’s audience, it makes sense that the media would attempt to spread its influence throughout this popular medium. In doing so, this new agent employed by the media will perpetually transform how the media works, bringing about the death of mass media through news print and the birth of an idiosyncratic and individualized media system.

First of all, the internet remains a more efficient resource for providing information than newspapers, magazines, and other print news sources. In the United States alone, more than 24 billion newspapers and 350 million magazines are published a year.3 That is tons of paper, literally! Imagine how many trees would remain standing if the print media further entered the digital world and posted everything online. One may argue that the convenience factor plays a large role in print media, as magazines and newspapers are much easier to carry around than a computer. However, as media convergence continues to occur and electronic devices continue to become smaller, faster, and more powerful, accessing news stories online is becoming less challenging and much more available. Henry Jenkins indicates the growing functional capacity of electronic devices in his book Convergence Culture as he explains his plight when phone shopping. Jenkins explains, “I didn’t want a video camera, a still camera, a Web access device, an mp3 player, or a game system. I also wasn’t interested in something that could show me movie previews, would have customizable ring tones, or would allow me to read novels.”1 Jenkins shows that technology has quickly allowed one device, the cell phone, to support functions that not long ago required multiple devices. Technology will continue to move forward in such a way that the old mediums such as magazines, books, and newspapers will be supplanted by advancements in digital and communications technology. Thus, the progression of technology will provide the means by which digital communications will become the future of the media.

Accessing news online has numerous additional advantages as the reader can become much more involved in the news story. After reading an article online, a person has the ability to easily find more information about the topic in the article at the click of a button. This opens up a world of possibilities in what a person can access online. Depending on what words get searched, the internet search engine Google can provide over 2 billion web sites containing the key words in less than .15 seconds. The internet remains the only medium by which this extremely fast information response can occur. Thus, the internet clearly has an absolute advantage over print media in terms of how much information it can provide to an individual in the smallest amount of time possible.

Now that the internet has an established advantage over the media mediums of yesterday, how exactly will this bring about the death of mass media and the birth of an individualized system? This process has already begun; however, it catches many by surprise. As consumers, we made it very easy for the media to sneak in and launch this process under our noses. Through social networking sites such as Myspace and Facebook, people build their personalities online without ever realizing it. Media advertisers have access to almost all of the information one puts on their Facebook page. A person’s “about me” information that resides on their Facebook page helps dictate what advertisements get placed on the sides of the web page for each person on Facebook. Two individuals can view the same Facebook page and have different advertisements on the page based on the information that the advertisers obtain from each of the viewers’ Facebook pages. As these types of websites continue to grow, the media’s individualization process in advertisement will also expand.

Internet usage in the future will become dominated by avatars, which are online “objects representing the embodiment of the user…[or] the personality connected with the screen name of an internet user.”2 Currently, avatars exist in many different places online. People throughout the world control avatars in Second life, an online 3-D virtual world, where users exist in the game as an avatar and can do almost anything that a person can do in real life. Players can highly customize their avatar to represent themselves in the online game. In addition to Second Life, many e-mail web sites, such as Yahoo!, now allow users to create 2-D avatars, or customized animated pictures that contain information about the real user. My e-mail provider uses this information like Facebook to customize the advertisements I see when checking my mail. As the popularity of online avatars increases, the relationship between the internet and media advertisers will forever change. User information represented by avatars will grow to the point where who you are becomes depicted by an avatar every time you log onto the internet. Thus, the media has access to who you are and they feed information based on your personality. This mutual symbiotic relationship benefits both the consumer and the advertiser. The consumer will receive information that he or she is interested in because the media group knows the person’s avatar and the media group has access to free information about the consumers. Thus, the mass media will essentially cease to exist online as an individual media will develop where the individual becomes the target, not a group as a whole.

The internet and electronic devices continue to develop as efficient tools by which the media can expand their personalized relationship with every person. The internet can also provide people with much more information, faster, and at a smaller cost than the current print media devices (newspapers, magazines, etc.). Consequently, the media continues to realize the power of the internet as the individualization process has already begun on social networking web sites and other internet sites. This process will continue to expand until every person who surfs the web will be represented by an avatar from which the media will collect and use information to provide each person with advertisements, products, and articles of interest to the specific user. Thus, the big media of the future lies not in mass media, but in a world dominated by individual relationships between persons and the media.

Works Cited

1Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2006.
2Jordan, Tim. Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. Routledge, 1999.
3“Recycling Paper.” General Mills Supply Co. 2007. 18 November, 2008.