Learning Objectives
- Describe the types of new media.
- Identify how the Internet has affected media delivery.
- Explain why new media are often more successful than traditional forms of media.
Life has changed dramatically over the past century, and a major reason for this is the progression of media technology. Compare a day in the life of a modern student—let’s call her Katie—with a day in the life of someone from Katie’s great-grandparents’ generation. When Katie wakes up, she immediately checks her smartphone for text messages and finds out that her friend will not be able to give her a ride to class. Katie flips on the television while she eats breakfast to check the news and learns it is supposed to rain that day. Before she leaves her apartment, Katie goes online to make sure she remembered the train times correctly. She grabs an umbrella and heads to the train station, listening to a music application on her smartphone on the way. After a busy day of classes, Katie heads home, occupying herself on the train ride by watching YouTube clips on her phone. That evening, she finishes her homework, emails the file to her instructor, and settles down to watch some comfort TV on a digital streaming service. While watching the show, Katie also scrolls through TikTok and makes some weekend plans with friends on Instagram or Discord.
Katie’s life today is vastly different from the life she would have led just a few generations ago. At the beginning of the 20th century, neither television nor the Internet existed. There were no commercial radio stations, no roadside billboards, no feature films, and certainly no smartphones. People were dependent on newspapers and magazines for their knowledge of the outside world. An early-20th-century woman the same age as Katie—let’s call her Elizabeth—wakes up to read the daily paper. Yellow journalism is rife, and the papers are full of lurid stories and sensational headlines about government corruption and the unfair treatment of factory workers. Full-color printing became available in the 1890s, and Elizabeth enjoys reading the Sunday comics. She also subscribes to Good Housekeeping magazine. Occasionally, Elizabeth and her husband enjoy visiting the local nickelodeon theater, where they watch short silent films accompanied by accordion music. They cannot afford to purchase a phonograph, but Elizabeth and her family often gather around a piano in the evening to sing songs to popular sheet music. Before she goes to sleep, Elizabeth reads a few pages of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Separated by nearly a century of technology, Elizabeth’s and Katie’s lives are vastly different.
New Media
Traditional media encompasses all the means of communication that existed before the Internet and new media technology, including printed materials (books, magazines, and newspapers), broadcast communications (television and radio), film, and music. New media, on the other hand, includes electronic video games and entertainment, and the Internet and social media. Although different forms of mass media rise and fall in popularity, it is worth noting that despite significant cultural and technological changes, none of the media discussed throughout this text has fallen out of use completely.
Electronic Games and Entertainment
First popularized in the 1970s with Atari’s simple table-tennis simulator Pong, video games have come a long way over the past four decades. Early home game consoles could play only one game, a limitation solved by the development of interchangeable game cartridges. The rise of the personal computer in the 1980s enabled developers to create games with more complex story lines and to allow players to interact with each other via the computer. In the mid-1980s, online role-playing games developed, allowing multiple users to play at the same time. A dramatic increase in Internet use helped to popularize online games during the 1990s and 2000s, both on personal computers and via Internet-enabled home console systems such as the Microsoft Xbox and the Sony PlayStation. Today, video games are played by people of all ages across consoles, mobile devices, and PCs. Competitive gaming and streaming platforms like Twitch have created global communities, and titles like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Among Us are cultural touchstones for a new generation. No longer associated with an isolated subculture, contemporary video games are bringing friends and families together via increasingly advanced gaming technology.
The Internet and Social Media
It is almost impossible to overstate the influence the Internet has had on media over the past two decades. Initially conceived as an attack-proof military network in the 1960s, the Internet has since become an integral part of daily life. With the development of the World Wide Web in the 1980s and the introduction of commercial browsers in the 1990s, users gained the ability to transmit pictures, sound, and video over the Internet. Companies quickly began to capitalize on the new technology, launching web browsers, offering free web-based email accounts, and providing web directories and search engines. Internet usage grew rapidly, from 50 percent of American adults in 2000 to 75 percent of American adults in 2008. As of 2024, over 90% of American adults use the Internet, with mobile devices being the most common way to access it. Pew Research data continues to show increases in online activity across all demographics. Now that most of the industrialized world is online, the way we receive our news, do business, conduct research, contact friends and relatives, apply for jobs, and even watch television has changed completely. To provide just one example, many jobs can now be performed entirely from home without the need to travel to a central office. Meetings can be conducted via videoconference, written communication can take place via email, and employees can access company data via a server or through secure cloud platforms like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. You very likely have had the opportunity to take an online college class.
In addition to increasing the speed with which we can access information and the volume of information at our fingertips, the Internet has added a whole new democratic dimension to communication. Becoming the author of a printed book may take many years of frustrated effort, but becoming a publisher of online material requires little more than the click of a button. Thanks to social media such as blogs, social networking sites, wikis, and video-sharing websites, anyone can contribute ideas on the web. Social media has many advantages, including the instantaneous distribution of news, a variety of different perspectives on a single event, and the ability to communicate with people all over the globe. Although some industry analysts have long predicted that the Internet will render print media obsolete, mass-media executives believe newspapers will evolve with the times. Just as the radio industry had to rethink its commercial strategy during the rise of television, newspaper professionals will need to rethink their methods of content delivery during the age of the internet.
New Media versus Traditional Media
New technologies have developed so quickly that executives in traditional media companies often face challenges to retain control over their content. For example, when music-sharing website Napster began enabling users to exchange free music files over the internet, peer-to-peer file sharing cost the music industry a fortune in lost CD sales. Rather than capitalize on the new technology, music industry executives sued Napster, ultimately shutting it down, but never quite managing to stamp out online music piracy. The industry adapted, and today’s dominant model is subscription-based streaming through services like Spotify and Apple Music, which pay artists through royalties.
The publishing industry has also suffered from the effects of new technology (although newspaper readership has been in decline since the introduction of television and radio). When newspapers began developing online versions in response to competition from cable television, they found themselves up against a new form of journalism: amateur blogging. Today, legacy newspapers compete not just with blogs, but with influencers, newsletters, YouTube creators, and TikTok commentators who cover current events in short-form video. These formats allow less time to check that sources are reliable or add in-depth analysis to a story. Traditional newspapers are also losing out to news aggregators such as Google News, which profit from providing links to journalists’ stories at major newspapers without offering financial compensation to either the journalists or the news organizations. Many newspapers have adapted to the internet out of necessity, fighting falling circulation figures and slumping advertising sales by offering websites, blogs, and podcasts and producing news stories in video form. According to recent Pew Research (2023), social media and mobile news apps are now among the top ways Americans get their news, especially among people under 30.
Pay-for-Content: Will It Work?
Critics of the pay-for-content model point to the failure of Newsday, a Long Island, New York, daily that was one of the first non-business publications to use the pay-for-content model. In October 2009, Newsday began charging readers $5 a week ($260 a year) for unlimited access to its online content. Three months later, an analysis of the move indicated that it had been a total failure. Just 35 people had signed up to pay for access to the site. Having spent $4 million redesigning and relaunching the Newsday website in preparation for the new model, the owners grossed just $9,000 from their initial readership.
However, the lack of paying consumers may be partly accounted for by the number of exceptions granted by the company. Subscribers to the print version of the paper could access the site for free, as could those with Optimum Cable. According to Newsday representatives, 75 percent of Long Island residents had either a newspaper subscription or Optimum Cable. “Given the number of households in our market that have access to Newsday’s website as a result of other subscriptions, it is no surprise that a relatively modest number have chosen the pay option,” said a Cablevision spokeswoman. Although Newsday’s 2009 attempt to implement a paywall was largely considered a failure, many publications have since refined the model. For example, The New York Times has found long-term success with a metered paywall, reaching over 10 million subscribers as of 2023.
New media have three major advantages over traditional media. First, it is immediate, enabling consumers to find out the latest news, weather report, or stock prices at the touch of a button. Digital music can be downloaded instantly, movies can be ordered via cable or satellite on-demand services, and books can be read on e-readers. In an increasingly fast-paced world, there is little need to wait for anything. The second advantage is cost. Most online content is free, from blogs and social networking sites to news and entertainment sources. Whether readers are willing to pay for content once they are used to receiving it for free is something that The New York Times set to find out in 2011, when it introduces a metered fee model for its online paper. Finally, new media is able to reach the most remote parts of the globe. For example, if a student is looking for information about day-to-day life in Iran, there is a high probability that a personal web page about living in that country exists somewhere on the Internet. As of 2023, over 90% of Americans, roughly 90% of Europeans, and around two-thirds of the global population have internet access. This widespread reach makes the Internet an ideal target for advertisers, who can communicate with their desired niche audiences via tracking devices such as profile information on social networking sites.
Key Takeaways
- Traditional media include printed materials (books, magazines, and newspapers), broadcast communications (television and radio), film, and music. New media include all forms of communication in the digital world, including electronic video games, the Internet, and social media. The Internet has added a social aspect to video gaming that has bridged the generation gap and opened up a whole new audience for video game companies, including senior citizens and families. The prevalence of the Internet in modern daily life affects us in nearly every way, from how we receive our news, to the way we do business, conduct research, contact friends and relatives, apply for jobs, and even how we watch television.
- New media frequently trump traditional media for three main reasons: They are more immediate, are often free, and can reach a wider number of people.
Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)
Review the traditional and emerging forms of media. Then answer the following short-answer questions. Each response should be a minimum of one paragraph.
- Think of three examples of traditional or new media. What are the advantages of each type of medium? What are the disadvantages?
- Which of these types of media has been around the longest? Which is the most modern?
- How has the Internet affected the delivery of other types of media?
- Do you believe that new media are more successful than traditional forms? Why or why not?
