The Changes of Media

Jeff Toepfer

11/8/05

Graphic Media Perspectives

Mary Anne Evans

The Changes Of Media

Media changes drastically over short periods of time. Just in the past ten years it has become much more advanced and useful for people all around the world. There has been an extreme advance in media technology. This includes the creation of analog-to-digital converters, technology convergence, and the changes in the media industry and audiences. There have been advances in the way gatekeeping and content filters are handled. The rise in the technology of books has even been so great that there has been a decrease in the annual sales by 44 million books. With the ascending spiral of technology the world of media will be a great place for the future.

Analog media has been used originally for audio recording for media that was analogous for the sound that it was creating. Although, recently Analog media has been used to refer to non-digitized media, such as film, audio, print media, etc. Since technology has advanced and become dependent on computers analog has been translated into digital media so that it is in computer and machine-readable form. It is put into binary digits so that computers may read and comprehend it. This process in which media is translated into computer-readable is called digitization. Communication of media has been transferring from the traditional analog media to the newer aged digital media. This is much more convenient in this new age because people have learned to depend on their computers to do work. When dealing with audio and video an analog-to-digital converter works at an extremely high rate. Digital media is a great advancement in media technology.

Technological convergence is the coming together of computing, telecommunications, and media in digital environment. It can be used in different types of media, such as print, audio, and video to converge it all into one digital media. Convergence makes mass communication digital for networked media so that it is not a necessity to communicate through words, images, and sound. This is very useful when dealing with multimedia situations when there is more than one type of media. For example, web pages combine several different forms of media together to create a web page with text, video, audio, and several other media forms. Technological convergence has been a very useful factor when dealing with the steady rising of Internet use. Without this it would be much harder to communicate through the Internet because there would be no digital environment for computing. The use of hyperlinks has been a huge advancement in convergence and communication. A hyperlink is an HTML code that is used to link to another webpage or element within a website. Technological convergence has been a main benefactor in making digital media what it is today.

Most media companies strive to make a profit for themselves. Media companies are amongst the most profitable private enterprises in the world. The money made in media is an extremely high amount that on average increases 20 percent a year in margins. This is about double the average of other industries in America. In the digital and analog world, concentration of ownership in media has been an expanding trend. However, digital and analog media has been quickly falling into the hands of few wealthy and extremely powerful owners. When few business owners take control of industries or a series of industries it is known as an oligopoly. Many of these industries are partially owned by shareholders who are interested in the financial situations of the companies. The people who own stock in these companies are often very small voices do to the power of the owners of these companies.

Analog mass communication was a large way for an audience to communicate with each other through messages to a receiver or audience. The audience would be large and anonymous. But now there are better ways of communication to audiences due to convergence. In today's age there are many ways to communicate, such as, online forums, e-mails, and other interactive media forms that make it easy and fast to communicate with others. These newer ways of communication are easier, quicker, and cheaper than traditional ways. Websites now use programs called cookies to recognize users and give them personal content. This gives the organizations a much better understanding of the behaviors and habits of the audiences. The audience for media has been growing as the media has been evolving towards the digital future. Audiences are constantly consuming more and more media. People have been tending to forget about the traditional ways of getting information from media, such as using newspapers and magazines. They have been leaning more towards the digital media, such as cable television and the Internet.