The New Forms of Media Publishing

    Today in this progressing society, new media technologies have changed on how we communicate socially. With the emergence of new media trends such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogs, online news sources changed the roles of journalism & communication.

New media like these are able to deliver news and information to readers faster than the normal media like regular newspaper and magazines. Consistent with this, Silverstone (1999) asserted that, the Internet had greatly increased the efficiency of producing mass cultural objects and distributing them around the world.

  

For instance, the latest news about the dead of the world most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden would not be spread so promptly and extensively around the world without these new media technologies (read news here). Printed newspaper could not have done this so promptly, I found out the news from Facebook itself spread by my friend circle and watched the breaking news itself from Youtube. In fact, according to The Telegraph (2009), The first recorded tweet about the New York airplane crash 2 years ago, came from Jim Hanrahan, four minutes after the plane went down.

All of the new media publishings have one thing in common, which is that they are all on the internet. The internet makes readers better informed, giving them resources that makes them more knowledgeable on the subject (Naughton, 2006). This bad side of using these new media is related to ethics, for example, Youtube , where it allows user to publish/upload video without being strictly screened for the content of video uploaded.


An example of this bad side can be seen in a number of videos published/uploaded by Wee Meng Chee or famously known as Namewee of him singing an edited lyric of Malaysia national anthem which rose up controversial issue which cased a racial tension among the Malaysian community. His conduct led him to face risks of being arrested under the ISA and worst, his citizenship being revoked (The Star,2010). Therefore, we must always bear in mind that freedom of speech should always come with responsibility.

Note: all of his controversial music videos can be found in-

<http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=namewee&page=&utm_source=opensearch>

References:

Naughton, John 2006, ‘Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem’, viewed on 4 May 2011, <http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/discussion/blogging.pdf>.

The Star 2010, “Namewee is ready to face the law”, viewed on 4 May 2011, <http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/10/20/nation/7257513&sec=nation>.

The Telegraph, 2009, 'New York plane crash: Twitter breaks the news, again', viewed on 4 May 2011, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/4269765/New-York-plane-crash-Twitter-breaks-the-news-again.html>.

Silverstone, R, 1999 ‘What’s new about new media?’ new media & society, SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi Vol1(1):10–82, viewed on 9 June 2011, <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/swiss/archive/Silverstone.pdf>