WE & New Media

New media and Globalization

The new media has increased communication between people all over the world. The Internet has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media. The evolution of new media technologies is the result of globalization or vice versa. Globalization shortens the distance between people all over the world with the help of electronic communication. Some scholars and experts express this great development as the "death of distance". As an inhabitant of informational society we use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct commerce, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. Hence New media has the ability to connect like-minded others worldwide. New media follows the logic of the postindustrial or globalised society whereby 'every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and select her ideology from a large number of choices. Rather than pushing the same objects to a mass audience, marketing now tries to target each individual separately. Technological determinism is the main concept which can be counter attacked by scholars as soft determinism that 'Technology does not determine society”.  This newly formed media is responsible for a remarkable social change like trends in fashion and the emergence of subcultures such as Text Speak, Cyberpunk, and various others. We can see contribution of new media in less radical social movements such as Free Hugs Campaign, Using websites, blogs, and online videos to demonstrate the effectiveness of the movement itself. Marshall McLuhan’s global village is here proves to be accurate in case of New media and its interactivity. 

Interactivity and new media

Interactivity is the prominent feature of new media, Internet replaces the "one-to-many" model of traditional mass communication with the possibility of a "many-to-many" web of communication. Digitalization of the media and media convergence are the ultimate outcome of new media is to Like. So, the new media with technology convergence shifts the model of mass communication, and radically shapes the ways we interact and communicate with one another. Interpersonal media as "one to one", Mass media as "one to many" and, finally New Media as Individuation Media or "many to many" is the newly formed model developed in the concluding part of 20th century. Interactivity can be considered as a central concept in understanding new media, but different media forms possess different degrees of interactivity, even some forms of digitized and converged media are not in fact interactive at all. Another new media example digital satellite television that uses digital compression to dramatically increase the number of television channels that can be delivered, and which changes the nature of what can be offered through the service, but does not transform the experience of television from the user’s point of view, as it lacks a more fully interactive dimension. It remains the case that interactivity is not an inherent characteristic of all new media technologies, unlike digitization and convergence. New Media changes continuously because it is constantly modified and redefined by the interaction between the creative use of the masses, emerging technology, cultural changes, etc.