Significance of New Media

Question 1

Cultural Optimist/Neophiliac view of new media

Answer 1

• More informed consumers, wider choices and more user participation
• people use internet for everything
• Neophiliacs argue that the internet and social media have been beneficial to society

Question 2

Greater democracy

Answer 2

• narrower political aspect, empowerment of people to organize against governments
• wider conception of democracy as right to freedom of ideas and expression

Question 3

Greater Democracy- Mcnair

Answer 3

• ‘information, like knowledge, is power’, the internet allows anyone to set up a platform that can hold people to account
  e. g. WikiLeaks, Occupy, Roar

Question 4

More Access to all kinds of info

Answer 4

• Access to huge amounts of information and high culture that was formerly restricted to the elites

Question 5

Mcluhan

Answer 5

• the world is a global village, the digitized new media collapse space and time barriers in human communication
  Boundaries between local and global times are blurred

Question 6

Social life and interaction is enhanced

Answer 6

• Postmodernists see new media as enabling people to form new identities in a globalized world
• chatrooms
• social networking
• Virtual worlds

Question 7

A threat to democracy

Answer 7

Neophiliacs underestimate the threat to democracy posed by new media corporations

Question 8

The Power of unelected commercial companies

Answer 8

MacKinnion- uses of concept of sovereign of cyberspace, the power of giant multinationals like Facebook etc, they have vast knowledge and power over gov and individuals, in the way gov used to

Question 9

Censorship and Control

Answer 9

• Mackinnon demonstrates how undemocratic regimes monitor and control media usage i.e. China
• Also big Media organisations still dominate the web
• Newman and Levy found the majority of news consumed online still comes from established news papers and broadcasting companies

Question 10

BLACK MARKET

Answer 10

• Silk Road was an online black market and the first modern darknet market, best known as a platform for selling drugs
• As part o the ‘dark web’ it was operated as a Tor hidden service, such that online users were able to browse anonymously and securely without potential traffic monitoring’
• Silk Road provided goods and services for over 100,000 buyers

Question 11

BLACK MARKET

Answer 11

• October 2013, investigation of the Federal Bureau of investigation (FBI) shut down Silk road and arrested Ross Ulbricht under charges of being the sites founder
• 6 Nov 2013 Silk Road 2.0 came online, run by former administrators of Silk Road
• Ulbricht was convicted of 7 charges in court in Manhattan and was sentenced to life in prison, November 2020, the us government seized more than £1million worth of bitcoin connected to Silk Road

Question 12

Commercialization and lack of consumer choice

Answer 12

• social networks are driven by profit making
• advertising throughout the new media

Preston points out that digital media is selective about waht people will look at and what will be kept away from them

Barnett and Seymour showed there is poorer quality media content with dumbing down and tabloidization to attract audiences

Question 13

The undermining of human relationships

Answer 13

• there’s an increase in social isolation as people move away from real communication
• there will be a loss of social capital, social networks of support that people have
• new media has increased surveillance of individuals, could be infringe on our rights.