This lecture was fundamentally concerned with the evolution of the Internet and the shifting forms of interaction users have experienced since its inception. The challenges of online news and the ways that companies can gain money from online outlets was also explored, as the class questioned the ethicality of paywalls and charging for previously free online services.
Before the emergence and rapid popularity of the world wide web, people relied on forms of old or traditional media for entertainment and information. The most popular forms of mass communication or legacy media were magazines, television, newspapers and the radio. We still use all of these forms today but the problem (or advantage) is that all of these forms are now available through the singular medium of the Internet.
Web 1.0 was the original Internet form and it was extremely advertising friendly with brochures and promotional material everywhere. Any content was surrounded with advertisements, mainly in the form of banners or headers that were hard to miss or jumped out at you as soon as the page loaded.
Web 2.0 is where we are now or at least is the place we are about to leave from. Also dubbed the social web, this internet form is defined by its capacity for interaction and communication. Poplar sites such as Facebook, twitter, youtube, myspace, wikipedia and linked in among others, encourage user produced content and focus on the formation of social groups and networking. Axel Bruns fro QUT coined the term "prod-users" to describe the emergence of user generated content who effectively act as their own producers.
The direction the Internet is headed towards is Web 3.0 which is known as the semantic web. Already, this is not a foreign or unheard of thing, especially considering the increasing popularity of smart phones and our amazement at the type of personalised applications available. This web form adds machine-readable meaning to packets of information. This information is particularly tailored to your own interests and needs and can be based on browser history or previously accessed material or on a simple input and answer process. This process is recognised as meta-tagging, where you can rely on web 3.0 to provide information that encompasses a wide variety of factors specifically for you, such as movie times, restaurants close-by, transportation deadlines etc.
The consequences of Web 3.0 for the news is hyper localisation that provides information specifically relevant to where you are. Advertisers readily exploit hyper localisation as it provides specific target audiences for particular types of products. The consequence of hyper localisation unfortunately, is that if we are exposing ourselves to our narrow likes and desires, we risk missing out on a lot of general knowledge and engagement with wider concerns and events.
The shift from paper journalism to online media is posing questioned for media producers, such as mad-dog Murdoch, as to how to get money out of consumers. Journalism is an occupation whose contributors require pay ( I know I sure want to get paid), so the concern is a valid one. The concept of a paywall has been proposed and has already been put into motion is some cases. The ethicality of this is questionable as issues of entitlement come into effect. Why should we now pay for something that we have always gotten for free? we expect web news to be cheap and accessible, in fact that i why a lot of users rely only on this format. How important is quality journalism compared to the simple reiteration of facts and events - can we put a price on how much it means to us - is that price more than the cost of the paywall. At least such paywall news sites are trying to offer add-ons to entice and reward subscribers, with membership privileges including discounts to popular shows, stores and events.
The direction of investigative journalism (which is a field i am particularly interested in) is not looking too good if people aren't willing to pay for quality journalism. Investigative journalism takes a lot of time, energy, research and should take fieldwork in order to write an interesting and thorough article that is fact-checked and not susceptible to lawsuit. Given my career aspirations, I hope that people will be willing to facilitate the production of quality journalism and afford journalists the resources and time needed to produce stories of a high calibre.
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