Digital Media Influence Generation Communications Research

Digital Media Influence Generation
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Digital Media Influence Generation
The advent of the so-called Web 2.0 has resulted in the emergence of various digital media. The term digital media is used in reference to the digitally compressed photo, video, and audio content. Such content is encoded in the sense that it has been converted into digital files (binary bits). The digital media is can be played, distributed, and manipulated by computers as well as relayed over various computer networks (Microsoft, 2017). Unlike the traditional media, the digital media facilitates group forming and interactivity. The latter is made possible due to the fact that computer networks are often addressable and bi-directional. The digital media facilitates group forming because in the sense that it allows individuals to form arbitrary and ad-hoc groups. This essay examines the influence of the digital media on this generation’s children.
Before delving into the digital media’s influence of such children, it is important to examine the historical and global perspective of the digital media. Dewdney and Ride (2013) acknowledge that the digital media has changed the way people used to communicate using the old media. Before the advent of the digital media, the United States was dominated by various traditional media including magazines, newspapers, radio and television. Specifically, “magazines have been part of American culture since American Magazine was first published in the colonial period” (Randle, 2001). Such magazines encouraged the reading culture in the country. Some of the ‘traditional” based media organizations in the country include the film and broadcast conglomerates such as CBS, Time Warner, News Corporation, Viacom, and the Walt Disney Company as well as the radio company called Cumulus (Albarran & Moellinger, 2013). With these traditional media, communication was only one way. Although they reached a large audience, they did not support interactivity.
On a global perspective, the traditional media were dominant in both China and the UK before the introduction of the digital media. In China for instance, the traditional media published and broadcasted news as well as created campaigns that were aimed at eliciting public responses on various key issues. Similarly, various individuals and groups were also allowed to publish their respective opinions in the traditional media in their quest to shape public opinion. However, the popularity of the traditional media in this country such as CNN and News weekly in both elicit...