The digital age is the period characterized by shifting from the traditional ways and industry of journalism and reporting to computerization of information through various outlets on the web. The main components of the digital culture are cyber culture, information culture, internet, and a virtual culture in the cyber society. The cyberculture is the expression of an increasingly individualized society in the globalized world. The Digital culture has had a significant impact on journalism in many different ways both positively and negatively. The digital culture more so entails the society’s participation and news now as a collaborative and participatory activity. The digital culture creates a new form of journalism without replacing the traditional journalism and the pre-existing media culture. However, despite the digital culture’s co-existence with the pre-existing writing and other media cultures, it affects and alters the way the public consumes news but brings great potential for future consumption of media.
Nature of the digital culture
The digital culture is somewhat a resistance to the traditional mass media models of broadcasts that include the public’s participation in contributing to trending news article to achieve a common goal and objective. An example of this occurrence is for instance citizens paying attention to what happens in their society and share the content with the world and other media participants. Avenues that the organization uses in the digital culture are through the community blogs, the wikis, social networks, social tagging, and bookmarking. One of the significant changes that occur in the digital culture is the act of remediation a misinformation. It allows for micro blogging and twitter as journalism to speak about an issue in the news and how it is affecting the society. Tweets, for example, are individualistic but all the same still a contribution from the community and the social environment on the happening of the day-to-day events.
The digital culture makes spreading of news items move faster and with speed versus the old media that has to pass through a team of editors and publishers for verification before publishing. Digital media exceeds the limitation of traditional journalism. However, the accuracy of traditional journalism is in most cases more accurate. The digital news has little credibility and occasionally based on the community’s opinions. The function of the digital news is the reuse, redistribution of information. It's spread entails clicking on the media and publishing without verification therefore in some occasions producing second-hand truths. The traditional journalism has, therefore, to catch up with the false spread of the digital media (Boyle 92). The digital media such as Twitter and Facebook are more of interactive news websites have a global network and a radically democratic organization. Digital media allows for sharing of information and various links to other web pages to reach an even wider audience.
The users gather information from different sources and eventually reconstructing them to come up with a coherent argument. The digital culture such as social media i.e. Twitter is more influential as a communicating tool and an instrument for breaking news. Journalist incorporates it in their reporting stream since they occur in real time and instantly. News consumption in the current day is not as in the pre-satellite days in which individuals waited for morning papers or at an appointed time for news from the television. The digital culture is the growing number of viewers, readers, and listeners that reach news by a click of a button and access it online. A journalist from televisions, radio and newspapers either partners with the social media avenues in spreading the news or face the growing competition from the more interactive online media (Buckingham 16). The digital culture gives room for open expressions from users, organization, and communities. The web publishers create a platform for news and the users then create the content. Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter demonstrate the power of digital culture and its influence on journalists and ordinary web users.
One of the fundamental changes is the approach of digital culture of creating web content and distributing it characterized by open communication, interaction, decentralization of authority, and the freedom to express opinions and share or reuse the published content freely. Another significant change is unlike the traditional journalism in which the publisher publishes content in the newspaper for instance or a magazine; a web publisher uploads content to a web site for the users to read. The users are free to share the content, and many other users can read and share their comments or add content to the article unlike in the traditional journalism such as in the magazine in which the audience could not make changes to the content or share their opinions (Boyle 91). The digital culture has evolved, and the interaction between the webmaster and the user is no longer dependent on direct means of communication, but it has turned to a new system of social interaction through simple syndication and social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Implications
Before the digital culture, the old media publishing required a printing press. The circulation of the news items stayed limited to a small fraction of people in a geographical location. Broadcasts through television and radio need expensive equipment for transmission of signals in a country, region, or the globe. After the digital culture, the users connect to the internet and have full access to a platform that is free and global. The new model of journalism assumes that a device is smart and so an individual explores patterns of communication without anyone’s permission. A person with a camera and a computer is a nonprofit of a self-publishing norm. Not only does the new media technology have an important effect due to its impact on the traditional journalism but also the way the different bulk of commercial and public media changes is important than the digital culture in which the citizen is the journalist or the independent bloggers. Both teams, however, transform the news media into an open, trustworthy platform for debates and acquiring information. As news becomes more open-sourced and nonlinear, journalism changes and evolves. Digital media challenges claims of how traditional media are the only individual champions of objectivity, authority, and quality.
Digital media enhances journalism and working for hand in hand compliments it rather than challenging it. In a different occasion, in the case of a renowned pop artist Michael Jackson’s demise in 2009, the news broke first on Facebook and Twitter ahead of all the major news networks. After the UCLA, Medical Center had made the announcement official; they verified the report and made it credible. Search engines, news websites, and Social network sites showed heavy traffic volumes an hour after the story broke. Some websites experienced technicalities, and other even crashed due to the heavy traffic of the news. The story displayed the consumption rate of news and the dissemination on the social platforms. The case also shows how fast the information and news travel and the reach worldwide. Digital culture makes news travel fast, and it knows no boundaries. The case also shows and demonstrates in textbooks by media gurus how the digital media breaches the gap between the consumers or audience and traditional media.
The case proves that the role of gatekeeping is no longer exclusive to a journalist. The case shows so since the participatory culture in digital media on engaging the consumers or audience has broken the wall of journalism that separates the customers from the journalist. In the current times, there are instances in which people drive news instead of the media outlets. The digital cultures have altered the scene, and knowledge or information previously disseminated top-down is now from bottom-up. The consumers of the news and the audience determine and dictate what is relevant to them. By the audience dictating what is important to them, they ascertain the level of engagement they pursue it online if they listen, watch, or read online before replying using tweets, posts, or texts. The news is now accessed anywhere by the audience, whenever they want and in the form in which they prefer it. According to Deuze (28a), the overall traffic of the social media platform visits grows over the years, and consumers spend more than six hours on sites such as Facebook and Twitter each day by December 2009.
The digital media is an emerging powerful voice and network that acts independently from traditional media. The journalists that have great systems with the help of new platforms such as social networks move across and go beyond boundaries of institutions. The citizen journalism acts as the leading watchdog and as a corrective means for the mainstream. The users and participants serve as the gate-watchers, analyzing, and observing the information and knowledge those pass-through publication avenues of journalism industries and the official sources. The digital platforms highlight their relevant and interesting information for their own. Citizen journalism has significant influences on dissemination of news. On July 2005, bombings that occurred in London news spread within six hours. The BBC outlets received nearly a thousand photographs, four thousand text messages, twenty pieces of amateur videos, and nearly twenty thousand emails from the public. The public participated in the news coverage more than ever before and enhanced their journalist’s reports in a way never seen before. The following day, the BBC evening television newscast began with an edited package from videos sent from viewers and the public.
After the case, the BBC network assigned twenty-three journalists to work on user-generated content to process all the received information, texts, emails, videos and photos from the public include through the social media platforms. Another big network such as CNN also has a department for user-generated content with separate branding. The audience uploads content such as photos, text, videos on ireport on CNN.com. Another case that demonstrates the significant effect of the digital culture is the event of the Sichuan earthquake with a 7.9 magnitude in China back in May of 2009. The BBC learned about the incident devastating the city through twitter. The tweets of the event surfaced minutes before notice from the US Geological survey. Aside from the citizen journalism, there is developing trends of networked journalism. The process includes mining of the public knowledge of the main issues of the news item to add value to it and the community. Deuze (68b) suggest that the journalist will report, edit and package the news but shares the entire process continually.
The type of press not only networks but also changes their roles of being a gatekeeper that delivers news to being a facilitator that connects user. Deuze (69b) gives an example in which the Guardian newspaper engaged the British public to assist them in trawling through many documents to expose the members of parliament’s scandals. In another instance, the Huffington Post in their off the bus project occurred due to a collaboration of citizen’s network and journalist in covering the US presidential elections from the campaign trails. The examples showed new ways of gathering news by combining input from professional writer and amateurs to give a different editorial outcome (Deuze 21a). The news industry continuously changes and is compelled to adjust and keep up with the digital culture with new ones rolling out.
Social media and the other digital applications create new opportunities for the entire news industry, and they raise possibilities of professional crisis for media organizations and journalist. The journalist has new equations of doing more with less. The reporters should now submit news items for multiple platforms and not only radio, print, television but also online. The journalist in the current era must be multi-skilled. The big networks such as BBC now create social media editors whose work is helping the BBC team and producers to engage the audience on social network proactively on Twitter and Facebook and acquire feedback. Deuze (18c) raises concerns on whether the recent increase of social media editors in newsrooms jeopardizes their role as editors. The primary concern is whether they will be less journalism and more of checking of facts or if they will relegate to just spotting trends in the social media platforms.
Conclusion
The news industry is in an era of transformation in which the old media is slowly becoming weary and new digital media culture is budding. The age is in a state in which the passive-watcher culture gives way to a more participating culture from the society and audience previously hooked on only traditional media for information. The culture is giving way to a more complicated landscape in which the ordinary citizen and the community have the power and ability to control other media technologies and tell stories in innovative, compelling and creative ways. This period is one, which people’s social, technological, and cultural ways of their lives intersect. There is no doubt that the implications and influences it has on journalist’s performances and shaping the future of news delivery. The essence of digital culture is the audience having the power to innovate, respond, contextualize, and experiment the media in new ways.