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The way we view media today has changed considerably when compared to even Just ten years prior. The media culture has evolved. The average human went from going to the supermarket in the morning to buy newspaper to going online in the morning to read BBC Online. Statistics show that printed news is still popular among people, with 84 of adults who are college graduates or higher in the United States having admitted to reading printed newspaper over online news (Nielsen Wire, 2009). However, the consistent rise in the number of people who choose online news to printed news cannot be disputed.
According to Pew Research (2009), the percentage of people who read online news for al age groups have risen, the most drastic rise being in the Generation Y sector, that is the sector of the population that was born in the year 1977 or later. According to the article, the percentage of people who chose to read newspapers in 2006 was 22, more than twice what it was in 20089. Though the death of print media is greatly exaggerated at present time, it is very likely to come. With technology becoming more and more important to society in an increasingly rapid timeshare, you can expect that its death will come much quicker than expected.
So with that, we must ask ourselves how does the production and consumption of media texts change through remediation Old media is basically referred to traditional means of communication and expression way before the existence of the Internet, such as Journalism industries like newspapers, books, film, and radio (Sails, n. D. ). In contrast to old media, new media is defined as interactive and engaging forms of communication that use the Internet. New media makes it possible for anyone to create, connect, collaborate and share creative content on the web (Circuit, 2009).
New media has injected new vitality and competition into news (Rand Media Group, 2012). Remediation, when pertaining to the media, is the integration or transference of one medium into another medium (WAIS, n. D. ). This basically means that remediation is the process of changing one form of media to another, usually for the purpose of reaching and impacting a larger amount of people. A very good example of remediation is when a book is adapted into a movie. Films like Into the Wild, the Harry Potter series and even cult favorite, Twilight, are all products of remediation.
Often times, it is the movie adaptation that opens peoples eyes to the existence of the books they are based on. The popularity of a movie adaptation can very much affect the popularity of the book itself. According to Sewer and Mending (2010, Para. 4), the popularity of the Twilight movies have not only boosted sales of the Twilight novels themselves but have also been pinpointed as the reason behind an 18 increase of science fiction and fantasy book sales among children and teenagers since the year 2005.
In the context of our Engaging Media unit however, we look at emendation as turning printed media such as newspapers and magazines into Internet-based media such as videos and online news sites. Such as with our recent remediation assignment, we were asked to take a textual medium and present it in a media format. We chose to focus our assignment on an article from the New York Times about Isabella Carr, a model who died suffering from anorexia nervous. What we did was, we took the article and converted it into a video, fit for the more visually aware generation of today’s world.
Through the advent of the Internet, the media is experiencing an alteration in their production and consumption process. The media has been shifted through remediation and this shift from old media to new media has revolutionized traditional media and has taken advantage of the massive potential of today’s technology. Content has become the central focus of our generation ever since the mentality of people has changed through the dawn of the web. Bill Gates wrote in his article Content is King, that the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of a photocopier that have the ability to take over distribution channels (1996).
The Internet allows for content to be distributed to a global audience at zero marginal cost to the publisher (Gates, 1996). In the past, old school media organizations assessed and controlled their distribution channels such as printing presses and broadcasting licenses (Yeats, 2011). Today, the Internet serves as a medium for production, consumption, and distribution. Over the past decade, more and more websites for people to communicate and visit has mushroomed all over the Internet. The web has become a fundamental tool for interaction in our daily lives and this is because of the network effect.
Gwen Sharp illustrates the network effect to be a situation whereby something becomes more valuable as more people use it (2012). Because of the network effect, users of the Internet find it necessary to express themselves through their own work, which gave birth to a new context of remix culture in our social evolution. Remix culture is becoming the norm of our generation today. The elements of social evolution are behaviors, skills and ideas. It is who we are, how we live and how we create developing new ideas from old ones (Ferguson, 2012). With that being said, copying is how we learn and discover Ferguson, 2012).
We cannot introduce anything new until we are certain that we know what we are doing, and we do that through emulation (Ferguson, 2012). Since our knowledge portrays who we are as individuals, it is important for people to demonstrate their creativity and skills to show express their identity (Dixon, 2009). People want to create and present their individuality and not Just consume. In the age of democratic media, the tools of media productions are literally at the palm of our hands (Gilmore, 2009). Furthermore, we can make what we create widely available for a global audience.
Unlike traditional media, element of distribution of new media is Just by letting people know that it is available online for them to see (Gilmore, 2009). Based on the framework of our recent remediation project, we produced a reanimated video which was based on an online newspaper article, by coming up with new ways to describe the scenario, unique and appealing ways to edit, and present the ideas, sounds and visuals (Pelvis, 2009). By transforming a textual based news article into a short news report video without altering the initial original work, we have successfully created an entirely new media format through emendation.
Consumers are always looking for new ways to approach new media by listening and viewing. They set the bar on what is worth their attention by how the story is being told, the idea of it, how it is able to capture their curiosity, and with the freedom to watch and listen (Pelvis, 2009). Referring to our remediation project as an example, we have made it available for viewers to see our video by publishing it on Faceable. The feedback that we have received from our remediation project is that it looks more interesting and engaging.
Rather than reading something, it is much ore fascinating for our viewers and consumers to visually experience the scenario by creating a platform for them to experience it in a unique and rich way – which also has some sense of our identity. Of course, new media has its shortcomings. The Internet has made it so easy for people to receive and distribute information, sometimes with harmful intentions. Users are allowed to curate and consume on their own terms, on their own choice and on their own moment in time (Mali, 2010). With the rise of such practices as remediation, piracy has become that much easier to get away with.
Copyright and ownership restrictions have become tricky to lay down as this new online era has blurred the lines of legality pertaining to this issue. Not only is distribution made simpler when done online, the media being distributed also reaches devastatingly large amounts of people. In addition, if you use the Internet, you are one of 2,267,233,752 in the world that is capable of accessing pirated media online (Internet World Stats, 2011). To further clarify Just how wide of a net the Internet has thrown over the worlds population, look no further than Youth (n. D. ).
On its chart of Most Viewed Videos of All Time, the current number one video is listed as having had 102,511,551 views. So as you can see, not only has new media indirectly caused acts of piracy to flourish, it has also made it that much more noticeable and accessible to the world. Taken as a whole, the web is not Just another medium like TV or radio is completely new and contemporary that comes with a whole new set of cultural notions (Lang, 2010). The web is the foundation of social evolution it changes how society thinks about information, media and their exchange.
The process of remediation does alter the production and consumption process of media texts and with this revolution comes limitations and weaknesses however, old media should start adapting to what consumers want in order to survive the Internet explosion (Fine, 2006). For example, old media such as newspapers and magazines have started to become accustomed to the web by creating online versions of their articles to provide a flat reading experience often mimicking the print version. Furthermore, these old media institutions also use social networking features into their website (Ziegler, 2008).