New Media and Traditional Media in the 21st Century
– Let’s Make a Conversation
People are living in the midst of a revolution of communication technologies. With the invention and popularity of the Internet and microelectronic devices, the means of mass communication had gone beyond traditional media and included new media, which profoundly affect the way people think, behave, and connect. An important change with the growth of digital media is from “one to many” to “peer to peer”, which facilitates sharing and human interaction. In the book “Communication Power”, Manuel Castells argues that the emergence of new media has transformed social dynamics and proposes that power in the Information Age is based on the management of communication networks. Similarly, Clay Shirky, throughout his book “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations”, makes clear that the spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way people interact, organize, and form groups and enabling people to communicate to large audiences.
Those progress brought by technological innovations sometimes cause individuals to question whether new media has made traditional media obsolete, and how should we deal with this new world where media amateurs and professionals intermingle. In exploring the communication approach in Castell and Shirky’s work, I come to a conclusion that new media’s easy access and flexibility are both enabling and disabling; so, because of this, new media and traditional media should be in a dialogue.
To start off, one thing that is enabling is how the scope of new media gives access to more people. As compared to the older age, when we receive information and communicate our messages through traditional media platforms of television, newspaper, radio, and magazine, we are bound to a certain physical place and have limitations in reach and scope. For instance, newspaper distribution is confined to a geological region, such as a town or a country; and TV content remains within the viewership of their country’s residence. New media, on the other hand, turned the information consumption more digital and thus spread more virally. Smartphones, tablets, laptops, and all other portable electronic devices could be carriers of messages. Besides, “space of flows” in the network society is not limited to a specific physical space but enable information transfer in various places, only through Internet (Castells, 2010. p. 34). Thus, news and information in the whole world are becoming accessible for everyone with an electronic device and access to the Internet, and thus, each information could reach a far larger number of audiences. What's more, Internet has transformed the control over the media “less completely in the hands of the professionals,” but to the “hands of everyone who owns a computer” (Shirky, 2008. p. 59). In the Information Age, almost everyone could be a content producer instead of a passive consumer. We can utilize the Internet to disseminate whatever information we have via many different forms of digital media, to a wide range of audiences. Take the loss and return of the Sidekick phone story as an example: Evan, a programmer who worked in the financial industry, was able to produce content on his website, which reached an enormous audience to help him get the phone back. If the story happened twenty years ago, who can imagine that an event small like this could get such a tremendous amount of global attention and achieve over a million viewers? To be honest, this story was unlikely to be published on a newspaper or covered by a TV station twenty years ago since it was too trivial to be considered newsworthy; and therefore without new media, it was almost impossible for Evan to reach tons of audiences who are able to offer help for him, not mention the result of global attention. Thanks to the web, people are free to voice their opinions, hit a broader audience, and ultimately become the dominator of our own society.
Furthermore, the other thing that’s enabling is the flexibility that new media give people. New media, which are “flexible enough to match our social capabilities,” (Shirky, 2008. p. 20) break traditional categories and also provide new means of human interaction. Media producers and consumers are flexible and not limited by content, time, and space. First, new media brings a notion called “timeless time” such that more things happen simultaneously in one place in the communication networks (Castells, 2010. p. 35). Thus, time becomes flexible on the Internet such that we can publish anything immediately via social media posts, unlike traditional media which tend to take a longer timeline to put together pieces of a story and distribute it via TV or newspaper. Moreover, instead of following a set of rules, most media content generators are free to express anything anytime, which facilitate mass amateurization and freedom of expression. For example, last year a Chinese girl published an article on Weibo, a social media site, accusing an old woman of stealing and brutally killing her dog by throwing it out of the window. The girl also included some pictures of her dog and screenshots of her conversation with the woman on social media, which caused an immediate sensation on the Internet. Users were irritated by the cruel and ruthless woman who not only did not regard stealing and killing a little life as wrong, but also spoke offensively, tormented, and even cursed the 20-year-old girl. Therefore, social media users united together, consoled the girl and provided legal advice to deal with her loss. Also, someone found the number and address of the woman so people started to send her abusing messages and threatened her. Therefore, an event which initially was neglected by policemen caused such a stir and finally prompted earned media to cover the event and the arrestment of the woman. If this story was only published in a newspaper, it might not result in a significant front-page effect and could be neglected by people. Also, since it was a private event, writing and publishing by the victim her own brought more sensational effect. Even though it was not as well-written or crystal clear as a newspaper article, the social media post truly touched people’s heart and made more people feel empathetic for her. The flexibility of new media also enables greater interactivity among both producers and audiences, since audiences can give instant feedback to producers through social media or websites. Just as in this case, audiences can react immediately to the incident through the power of the Internet, instead of waiting for days for newspaper editors to send their messages to the victim. We are in the midst of increasing ability to share and cooperate, so the effects of new media are far more widespread and momentous than just telling a story. We have greater control over the message and the two-way communication helps us break the barriers to group action and amplifies our social skills.
Aside from that, the disenabling thing about new media is that the scope and flexibility have some negative aspects. Due to the annihilation of the significance of time order, people think less about the order of events but how they group together. When we do not need a time order, this might lead to some misleading conclusions. For example, last month a woman posted several pictures of herself getting injured on Instagram and Weibo, claiming that she was a victim of domestic abuse by her husband. The post quickly created an uproar on the Internet because the woman’s husband was a famous actor, and people started to criticize the actor for his act of violence. After several days, the actor published another post on social media to admit his mistake. These two social posts grouped together created a misunderstanding that the actor was guilty and his wife was innocent. However, the truth came to light recently. The woman married her husband only for his property, therefore she faked her scars and bruises and posted on social media to obtain people’s empathy. At the same time, she hired gangsters to threaten and trace her husband, and forged the social media post. The truth tells people how easy people can be misled by information on social media because it often blurs time order and the boundary line of morality. In this case, social media audiences were unable to see any antecedent or scene behind the post; therefore, the posts successfully oriented and misled the direction of public opinion. Since people are free to post on social media without restriction, it becomes harder for us to figure out what and who to trust. Pictures and videos can be fake and misleading, so do human words. Because social media users are not required to follow proper conduct as professional journalists, sometimes they just tell part of the story or distort the story and thus misguide the audiences. So, how could the society achieve justice if everyone can post a story without restriction, even those without moral code? New media thus create a circumstance for fake news to grow and disseminate virally.
On top of that, traditional media are less flexible and have less scope; however, that results in more professionalization. The news quality in traditional media is controlled by media professionals who “have undergone specialized formal education and have accepted a group-defined code of proper conduct” (Shirky, 2008. p. 58). As compared with these strict requirements of traditional media production, social media producers generally require less knowledge, skills, and training. Therefore, traditional media can do things that new media cannot do. In the spurious “domestic abuse” incident, it was eventually traditional media reporters who presented the actual news story to the public by gathering extensive materials from the woman and the actor’s friends and family. They did interviews on credible people, verified all information, and finally published the work with accuracy and clarity. The news story was disseminated from traditional media channels including newspaper and television to Internet. Even though it took a longer time for the truth to be revealed to public, people still trust more the professionals rather than amateurs. Why? Because traditional media professionals mostly deliver factual news stories. They not only write what they see, but also research what causes it and find the impartial angle to reveal it, without any made-up elements. In another word, they confirm facts and write in a much higher standard. All contents they produce are the most sought after and thus credible and impactful. Therefore, as compared to various levels of quality of new media – from weak content and deliberately false information to professional content, quality of traditional media is better and more professional.
Last but not least, traditional media are becoming more dynamic and less static because they have to respond to new media. In today’s world of news consumption, traditional news media still play a vital role because people are more likely to trust a reporter on news rather than someone else on social media. Hence, when rumors are carried out on social media, we need traditional media to respond, collect evidence, and back up their point. For example, last year an article was spreading virally on Chinese social media, which accused the president of South Korea’s Lotte Group of deriding Chinese people as philistine and spineless. Since there already had an intense controversy between Chinese and the Lotte Group for the territorial issue, a batch of fake news emerged at that time and news producers utilized people’s sense of nationalism to achieve more viewership and profits. The truth was exposed on the next day, as a professional newspaper posted an article to indicate the mistakes of the fake news. They did necessary works of fact-checking and found out evidence that the rumor was initially started from a web user’s post, which claimed that his source came from a South Korean newspaper called “Global News Eye”; however, after research, that newspaper did not even exist. Reporters also found out that the Lotte Group had never been interviewed on any content related to the Chinese market. Therefore, facts eventually scotched the rumors. In this case, traditional media played an important role in clarifying the truth. We cannot imagine that how many malicious people exist in the society who attempt to use fake news to influence and dominate people’s minds to attain their selfish objective. If traditional media do not respond to social media and just let social media republish articles without doubting the authenticity, we might always question if we trust what we see. In addition to responding to new media, professional media also learn from new media by adapting to digital platforms. We can now read legacy newspapers such as The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal online and on our digital devices, which indicate a fluid digital age of journalism. What’s more, some professional media also take the approach of social sites like Buzzfeed to stay more relevant. For instance, many news sources such as The New York Times have started to invest heavily in video content. For the foreseeable future, if traditional media produce more comprehensive content and engage with young audiences, they will likely become as viral as new media sites.
In a nutshell, even though new media significantly alleviate the barriers to communicating with larger audiences and connecting with more people, there are still disabling aspects. New media breed the overflow of fake news, and readers of new media always need traditional media professionals to back up their point. Therefore, traditional media and new media are much more symbiotic than competitive and should be in a conversation for the sake of improvement of the network society.