The new media revolution is only a revolution in name.
By: Donette Brown
05009928
Let us examine the present situation. Many people are accepting and becoming more accustomed to the digital world. Many industries are becoming increasingly computerized and more and more people are communicating with one another via digital media. Cellular phones are very popular among the populations in our societies; so much so that an individual is now a misfit if he or she does not have at least one cellular phone. Businessmen and women find pagers, personal digital assistants (PDA’s), digital organizers and notebooks very useful. Persons with busy work schedules make use of new technologies such as telecommuting, telemarketing and teleconferencing. Also there has been a upsurge in the number of newspapers available online. According to the book, “The Dynamics of Mass Communication: Media in the Digital Age”, by Joseph R. Dominick, “Of the 150 top newspapers in the world, 148 offer their news online.” The younger generation is more sensitized to these developments and is most likely to be explorers of the internet and owners of gadgets, such as i-pods.
All the above are aspects New Media and their increasing popularity cannot be denied, however it is unfair to say that, these changes are equivalent to a revolution. According to The Collins Students’ Dictionary, a revolution is “a far reaching and drastic change.” I would like to point out that the more things change is the more they remain the same, because amidst these seemingly revolutionary alterations in this digital age, there are some conventional behaviour that have not changed to compliment these developments. Author of the blog entitled “The Caribbean and Globalization”, Bob Heights, writes, that industrialization and the French revolution were truly revolutionary events because the changes which followed were of a relatively abrupt nature. The same can hardly be said about the changes gradually facilitated through new media.
It may seem as though everybody is adapting well to these new technologies, because almost everybody has an e-mail address, but really it is only a small percentage of people who are adapting well. There are many persons who still do not have access to the internet and this reality is not about the change any time soon. Many of us still prefer to have things manually done instead of utilizing digital resources. Besides persons still write what they need to be typed before they actually type it. That aspect is still manually done. There are those persons who get frustrated with new media apparatus and think that they are too complicated to be mastered. Needless to say many of us do not accept change as well as we should. Take for example the first year students at CARIMAC. Our instructors expected us to be exposed to all the new technologies of new media but many of us are not. Partly because we lack the enthusiasm or we simple can not explore what we do not have access to. According to a research I conducted based on the likeliness of printed newspapers being replaced by their online counterparts, many schools still do not have the necessary resources to effectively expose students to these technologies at an early age, so that appreciation and enthusiasm can be developed in them. Finally, many parents also believe that technology based gadgets foster a sort of anti-social behaviour among children and are therefore skeptic when purchasing these items.
Perhaps in a few years when our social and economic realities have reached the level of development needed for these technologies to thrive then new media will be a revolution in all aspects of the word; but as long as things remain the same, new media can only be considered a revolution in name.
