#technologicallifestyles

New Media has shifted the way we previously viewed the world. No longer are bound to traditional mediums, society’s convergence with the digital era has redefined the lines of audience and producer, creating both to be just as powerful as the other. That being said, we now live in a place where audience popularity depicts the cultural and economic value deeming the presence of a product lies on relatable and engaging content. As Henry Jenkins said “…if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.” (2007).

Technology now serves as a means to enhance our lifestyles. Mobile mediums, like smartphones allow us to stay connected, keep informed, be entertained and organised. They’re little devices with huge responsibility holding our upmost personal details. If they fail us, we are exhausted with hatred for bad servers and apps and lose our ability to contact certain people and retrieve important information.  We become in a way handicapped to society’s instantaneous needs, depending so much on technology that we suffer the same symptoms someone who is giving up smoking would when it’s gone. With this in mind it’s not surprising that expect the same limitless bounds to apply to our entertainment desires.

The evolution of transmedia and media based upon user generated content has allowed enterprises such as film to develop their stories and interact with fans in ways that just were not possible before. Fans and especially those who pose as a collective fandom are able to sway producers and hold real economical prowess that can be detrimental if their ultimate desires for the franchise go unheard or ignored i.e. the producers of The Walking Dead were given death threats by fans for killing off their favourite characters and threatened to riot if Daryl Dixon was killed off.

As traditional medias merge with new media’s we see things such as live tweet feeds on stories in real time. News reporters and even courthouses now utilise videos from YouTube as evidence on certain cases. The notion of what needs to be a professional product and its legitimacy is now blurred with everyday citizens holding the power to harness and publish information online without the need for any real credentials in any given arena.

The wildfire spread of social media and news has proven to be one of the most affected areas. In an instance, last April when a tweet made by Associated Press claimed that Barrack Obama was injured in a White House explosion. The news, although fake, sent shock waves through the stock market gaining over 4000 retweets and causing enough damage to wipe out $120 billion of stock value in seconds.

Entertainment also suffers here with the laws of piracy and copyright infringement constantly at battle. It opens the argument that lazy practitioners can benefit from others hard work with little to no effort by effectively using someone else’s material. In the book YouTube and the Mainstream Media authors Joshua Green and Jean Burgess write,

 “The repetitive framing of YouTube as an amateur ‘free-for-all’ rather than a place for community or artistic experimentation, for instance, situates it as a space where the public or the masses are rising up from the bottom, so that the matters of concern around it have to do with lawlessness, the crisis of expertise, and the collapse of cultural value.” (2009, 16. Jean. B and Green. J)

So, has new media stained quality material or has it enhanced the way we view the world?

  REFRENCES

  JOURNALS

Bourdieu, P. (1993b). The production of belief: Contribution to an economy of symbolic goods. In R. Johnson (Ed.), The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature (pp. 74–111). New York: Columbia University Press.

Burgess, Jean and Green, Joshua, (2009). Chapter Two : YouTube and the Mainstream Media. In Burgess, Jean and Green, Joshua, Youtube : online video and participatory culture, (pp.15 - 37). Cambridge UK: Polity Press. 

David, Matthew, (2013). Chapter 22 : Cultural, Legal, Technical, and Economic Perspectives on Copyright Online : The Case of the Music Industry. In Dutton, William H, The Oxford handbook of internet studies, (pp.464 - 485). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 

Shefrin, Elana (2004). Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom : Mapping new congruencies between the Internet and media entertainment culture., Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (3) pp.261-281. 

ONLINE

Angry Walking Dead Fans Threatened to Hunt Down and Kill Producers | The Walking Dead- Wetpaint. 2014.  Accessed 31 March, 2014 Available at: 

http://www.wetpaint.com/walking-dead/articles/2013-06-10-angry-fans-threatened-hunt-down.

How Does One Fake Tweet Cause a Stock Market Crash? | TIME.com. 2014. Accessed 01 April, 2014. Available at:

 http://business.time.com/2013/04/24/how-does-one-fake-tweet-cause-a-stock-market-crash/.

  I Forgot My Phone - YouTube. 2014. Accessed 29 March, 2014. Available at:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8.

Slash Me, Mash Me, Spread Me….- Henry Jenkins. 2014.   Accessed 29 March, 2014. Available at:

http://henryjenkins.org/2007/04/slash_me_mash_me_but_please_sp.html.

Student 'addiction' to technology 'similar to drug cravings', study finds - Telegraph. 2014. Accessed 01 April, 2014 Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8436831/Student-addiction-to-technology-similar-to-drug-cravings-study-finds.html. [Accessed 01 April 2014].

“The Walking Dead”: If Daryl Dixon Dies, We Riot! - International Business Times. 2014.  Accessed 31 March, 2014. Available at: http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/521735/20131113/walking-dead-daryl-dixon-dies-riot.htm#.Uzkap_mSySo.