Suzanne

WK 3 New media new audiences – Fiona Martin

New media new audiences – Fiona Martin

I must admit I did get a bit lost in this reading – with regards to the poltical and legality aspects.

This reading talks about the relationship between, new technologies, the media industry and the audience. Fiona says that the introduction of mew media in australia has forced the old media industries to develop and evolve in order to compete of the audiences attention.

The evolution is how Interactivity is going to take a role in the way the new media is delivered.

What is new Media? The definition is very broad and basically seems to include “a suite of digital communication technologies that are variously mobile and/or multimedia and /or networked.

The big buzz word here is certainly INERACTIVITY – ” simple human-computer/computer-response interchanges” . Then there is the degree of interactivity, to what extent can user participate?? With this degree of interactivity, new behaviours are forming, like online lurking, flaming. I guess like anything that has been introduced into society the good always comes with some bad.

The writer goes on to speculate what will be the next best thing, and which technologies will incorporate other technologies to make them more interactive. She suggest the use off using mobile phone in conjunction with television to play games. We are seeing this in its initial stages at them moment I think, with the late night cash-give-away quiz shows. Then of course we are seeing an almost seamless convergence from television, the web to the mobile by such shows are Australian Idol and Big Brother.

She raised many issues in this reading, but one I found very interesting was the Creativity Control. Trying to control the copyright on material on the web and how that can effect that way your brand is seen. OF course there is a huge problem with peer-to-peer software and the sharing of music, and video. As companies struggle to try and save their “creative control” – THe BBC has opened up its digital archives for the use by British citizens, under a “creative commons” type licence. I guess they have seen how something like youtube.com or the simple act of having some footage etc spread across the web via email or posting will increase their brand awareness???

The BBC is the first to do this, but other seem to still want to hang on to that central control. The new step for interactivity seems to be going beyond, SMS voting for you favourite singer to editing, manipulating video, music and pics and publishing them on the web for all to enjoy!!! Interactivity is allowing more self expression on the web.