Developments in NDM: Essay (48)

“The development of new/digital media means the audience is more powerful in terms of consumption and production.” Discuss the arguments for and against this view. (48)

Detail

Decline of newspapers

Social media activity

• “The barricades today do not bristle with bayonets and rifles, but with phones.”

Paywalls

Citizen journalism

Hyperreality

UGC

News values

The impact of NDM on the news industry

Marxism and pluralism

Globalisation

Response

Developments in new and digital media have matured rapidly on an annual basis to complement the prevalence of technological advancements. As a result, dramatic effects are set on the way that audiences are ‘consumers’, and newly also: the ‘producers’ of information. In the forms of entertainment and news, new and digital media has inspired an overwhelming proliferation of globally accessible digital sources, from which audiences can access values and ideologies not otherwise available to them due to the internet being considered “the most important medium of the twentieth century”.

Digital technology has grown to intervene in virtually every aspect of modern lifestyles since the 21st century, and has hence incited what is proclaimed: the “information revolution”, an idea which is undeniably so because there is now no clear dichotomous distinction between what we consider a ‘producer’ and a ‘consumer’ in today’s digitally-operant social landscape. Whether this empowers an audience in terms of consumption and production however, is debatable across different perspectives which determine whether examples of audience consumption and production can prove to be empowering.

Evidently, one of the most notable changes in the way that information is reported to audiences - is the decline of the newspapers industry. With smart devices becoming increasingly integral in the lifestyles of first-world masses, news is instantly accessible to audiences in many multimedia formats. This leads to traditional newspapers needing to adopt a different angle (newspaper content is now predominantly based on views and analysis rather than being solely informative) in order to sustain some purchase value. Yet even though newspapers have adopted such a strategy, many news values theorised by Galtung and Ruge are far superiorly met by digital means of reporting. Smartphone/tablet applications such as TheGuardian app notifies users instantaneously at the dawn of every headline and provides them with the ability to have their selection of news tailored according to their own preferences. This provides one of the many perks of digital news to even former newspaper giants, which have now tactfully chosen to adapt to NDM developments to avoid the costly manufacture of redundant newspapers.

With regards to finance, newspaper institutions have largely suffered from the past years as indicated by annual financial reports which have shown an ascension in losses incurred. This can be attributed to the fall in demand for newspapers due to the greater accessibility of online news via social media sites such as Twitter, BuzzFeed and Facebook, as well as Google which is allegedly responsibility for the reduced revenue of newspaper corporations, who have less businesses advertising through their platform. A recent online report discovers that MailOnline is the most frequently visited digital news platform worldwide, and is forecasted to accumulate over £100m in revenue over the next three years. The tabloid’s conservative, right-wing approach on socio-politically sensitive topics is imitated on the website and serves, what Marxist theorist Gramsci coined: a hegemonic view.

Consumers are effectively passive recipients of these biasedly hegemonic values, and has thus been demonstrated by the resultant victory of the Conservative party in the 2015 UK general election. This was demonstrative of the ultimate falsification of Murdoch’s sinister statement claiming “The internet has given readers much more power”, which was clearly retorted by the election results after the undeniably overpowering support for the Labour party, over Twitter in particular. Murdoch’s involvement in the elections promotes a continuing disempowerment of audiences, which is reinforced as research indicates that no government has been elected without the assistance of Murdoch since 1969. This shows a clear constraint on democratic practice which remains unaffected by the development of NDM, which although gives the illusion of an increased democracy, as Keen suggested, “Rebellion is encapsulated in the internet”, the results are yet bound by hegemonic power in making important sociopolitical decisions.

The empowerment of audiences is considered in one stance according to the access to variously ranging views and values. The extent to which this ability is granted to UK audiences is a lot more debateable in comparison to the Stalinist model of North Korea, which has its media strictly limited to reinforcing only the views and ideologies of the dictating proletariat. The UK is commonly determined the polar opposite of this, being regarded as a population largely liberal in its ability to advocate and support ranging views, a lot of which differ from those of the governing Conservative body. New and digital media enables this output of pluralistic views on social media networks, a profound one being Twitter, which generates discussion by the use of tweets, mentions and the newly introduced ‘like’ system – indicative of support for publicised information. Opinion leaders such as Owen Jones, who are openly against the Marxist nature of the cooperation among leading governments and the Murdoch controlled media, which statistics suggest influences around 50% of the total mainstream media in the UK. This indicates a disempowerment of audiences in wholesome as half of the output is under regulation of the governing state.

This is further justified by the Ipsos Morum poll of 2014 which finds the majority of Britain to be under the false impression that socio-political moral panics are prevalent to a much larger extent than they really are. Correlations between this and the hyperbolised representation of these panics by the mainstream media are found as debates of false benefit claim and the establishment of Islamic  beliefs in the UK are believed to be generally a lot more significant. Ultimately, the hegemonic control of the media is suggested in a cynical nature as it is found that the media defies its primitive role to inform audiences, as they do in fact misinform them with false beliefs which fuel moral panics and thus demonstrate a reinforcement of values advocated by the governing body, hence disempowering a society which is made to merely believe they are under pluralistic liberation.

To a definitive measure, the internet continues to prove itself unsuccessful for audience empowerment as Herman and McChesney state: "the egalitarian potential of the technology is minimised" and instead, "global media firms (are) able to incorporate the internet and related computer networks into their empires". Such is evidently demonstrated by the wide internet-based digital technology market as institutional conglomerates such as Google and Facebook adopt smaller uprising companies.  

The print industry for media has also suffered greatly due to a failed recognition of the overpowering force the internet had in the late 90s. Mistakingly, industrialists anticipated free digital media content to merely promote printed content in the form of a marketing tool, which resulted in an unprecedented tide, washing away the purpose of print as digital media had proven itself as a free and reliable platform to obtain information in sophisticated ways. As a defence mechanism, David Simon demonstrated support for the implication of paywalls by the New York Times and Washington Post to maintain sustainability in the digital climate. This was proposed as a means for institutions to collect revenue which would be reinvested into the journalism of the content provided, making for high quality material worthy of payment. With the availability of free major news websites such as The Guardian and Mail Online, audiences neglect the paywalls of Murdoch’s The Sun and The Times as the incentives for payment seem unreasonable for audiences who have the free abundance of the internet at their disposal. Nonetheless, it is worth acknowledging that audiences are resultantly at risk of being disempowered instead because of the decreasing value of journalistic content because of the decrease in revenue accumulated by these decaying organisations. Consequently, the news industry is susceptible witnessing a dystopian future as the overall quality of news is reduced to resemble the poorly criticised standard of celebrity gossip providers such as TMZ and, growingly, Mail Online.

An irrefutable and revolutionary shift in the modern media landscape is the growing significance of social media. This has proven itself, over the past decade as a developingly significant tool for audience empowerment. Coincidentally, with the growth of digital technology and the convergence of multimedia, audiences can now utilise the power of producing user-generated content in order to promote a whole new world of information provision. Considering this, the prevalence of citizen journalism has been symptomatic as evidenced on many instances of a significant role that this has had upon the socio-political consensus worldwide. A profound example of this was the Rodney King beating, which showed smartphone footage displaying an Afro-American citizen severely subjected to police brutality, a tragic phenomenon which is growingly more common as of 2014’s Trayvon Martin incident, among dozens of cases. This inspired an uproar through the use of Twitter, which is an actualisation of an ‘opinion’ report by TheGuardian stating “The barricades today do not bristle with bayonets and rifles, but with phones.” (2015). Provingly, social media has raised an imperishable awareness among engagers with the use of hashtags such as #blacklivesmatter which have circulated tremendously ever since its dawn. Although this has had a positive social impact, it is limited by the ultimate proletariat power of governing bodies such as the American police force, which has failed to justly punish its officers for racist discrimination in their treatment of, well, sometimes - felons. Therefore, the empowerment of audiences is yet to be achieved in this field as ultimate decisions remain unaffected by social protest.

In conclusion, the development of new and digital media has undeniably granted audiences with the autonomy to access and reproduce materialised information in a way which was once only reserved to major corporations. This has significantly been positive in its way of enlightening and entertaining audiences in revolutionary ways. However, profound decisions affecting lifestyles are yet reserved to the elites, and hegemony remains largely a pivotally influential contagion upon the majority of media consumers.