New and Digital Media: end of unit question

Pros - Easy access to global news stories. It's allowed greater communication between countries and people, allows the sharing of users information, photos and videos to each other and therefore allows users to be updated and connected to each other. Businesses can now use the internet to look at competitors and their pricing as well as using the internet as a source of research. More freedom (can be on pros and cons) A lot of user generated content can be found especially on sites such as YouTube and Blogger, this can therefore lead to a more unbiased news report or even a quicker reporting of the news e.g. many crimes committed during London Riots were filmed and uploaded on YouTube.

Cons - However, the internet is difficult to control. There are billions of websites with false information which many users end up spreading across the internet and possibly leading to a 'dumbing down' of society. Due to the internet being difficult to control, many users can easily come across many dangerous and explicit; harmful material which can easily influence any young user. Paedophilia and internet safety as always been an issue, many users may not portray themselves as who they truly are. Cyber-bullying has been created due to the improvement of technology.

Theories: 
- Pareto's law: follows a similar idea as the 80/20 rule. The majority of the ownership of the media we consume is produced by a minority of media businesses.

- Copy-cat theory: the copy cat theory can be linked to the internet as the information and videos we consume online could possibly lead to influencing many users. E.g. London riots was heavily reported over twitter and created large groups of teenagers wanting to copy what is going on around London, in their local area.

- Sherry Turkle: "Alone together" author, states that we communicate with each other but not in traditional ways. We communicate over the internet instead of in person which therefore can be quite a worrying concern for society in both physical health and mentality.

- Briggs and Burke: "The internet is the most important medium"

- Castells: "An application that will usher in the information age"

- Andrew Keen: The author of  'The Cult of the Amateur - How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture' states in his book that the activity and creation of webpages and blogs is similar to a million monkeys just typing nonsense

- Lin and Webster: State that the 5% of all websites accounted for almost 75% of user volume.

New and Digital Media Stories: 

- MySpace: MySpace founder believes that Rupert Murdoch destroyed his site after he bought it.

- Funeral selfie: Obama's selfie with David Cameron and the Danish Prime Minister was seen as disrespectful as it was at the funeral/tribute ceremony celebrating the life of Nelson Mandela.

- Twitter: A Guardian journalist replies to an article published in The Australian who states that the use of internet and social media such as twitter is destroying a journalists job. The Guardian journalist disagreed with this statement and believes that twitter is a useful tool. News can easily spread across the internet, it allows users/readers of the newspaper to contact journalists easily and give them the news quicker than anyone who doesn't use social media sites. It also allowed journalist in certain countries to pass on information to other journalist across the world. Sometimes when a big event or war is going on within a country and journalist find it difficult to land their helicopters, they can contact a journalist who is already in the country to provide them with up to the minute news.

- London Riots: The riots were heavily reported over Twitter allowing journalist to gather information from their followers all over London, it also allowed a video of helpless people being beaten and robbed during the riot to go viral. Negative uses of twitter was that some users used it as a way to communicate on when or where to attack certain stores.

- Occupy Wall Street: Videos went viral all over YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc. and allowed protesters to communicate with each other easily.

- G8 Riots: The G8 riots saw the death of a male at the hands of policemen. A man named Ian Tomlinson was pushed hit by a police baton on his legs and then pushed to the floor and died shortly after. A video of this went viral after the man recording the video found out about the death. It was stated that the police officers did not take responsibility of Ian's death and did not tell the truth of the whole story until the UGC video was released and went viral.