Digital and Traditional Paper Media Analysis. Research Paper

Digital and Traditional Paper Media Analysis
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December 17, 2019
Literature Review
In today’s age where knowledge is accessible with a simple flick of a finger, it is easy to take printed materials for granted. Traditional paper media such as newspapers, magazines, and books are having a hard time titillating the interest of many young people who have been born with accessible technology and the internet. Keeping up with the influx of knowledge and information has been taking a toll on traditional paper media, especially due to the internet’s transitory characteristic.
However, traditional media is not the only one being taken for granted. In the last decade alone, innovations such as search engines, social media, big data, and the overall commercialization of the internet are such common stock today that it drove people into taking digital media for granted. According to Loader & Dutton (2012), these innovations and technology have become “…significant in nearly every sector of society around the world (609).
This goes especially for today’s students (high school to college, and even earlier) — the so-called “Digital Natives.” This term is owed to Prensky (2001), where he called the students in this age the “native speakers” of the “digital language of computers, video games, and the Internet” (2). As for those who do not belong in this category, Prensky coined the term “digital immigrants.” According to him, these two groups process information differently because of the different environments that these groups grew up with. He further proposed that digital immigrant teachers should shift their slow and step-by-step, and book-read teaching technique to a fast-paced, sensory, and fun experience to penetrate the interest of these so-called digital natives.
This is supported by a paper made by von der Heiden, Fleischer, Richert, and Jeschke (2011) where e-learning concepts are beneficial not just for digital natives, but for digital immigrants as well.
One problem that comes to mind is the quality of information bred online. Since Prensky (2012) suggests that digital natives process information fast and are more likely to multitask, it is inevitable for them to err in terms of the accuracy of the information they get, especially online. This is seen by the use of social media to get news and information and the lack of triangulation to confirm whether or not their source is accurate.
However, aside from the problems on verifiability and accuracy of sources, the use of social media and digital media in the drive for information also seems to be a purposeful avenue. In a case study done by Johannessen (2015), political protest groups have been seen using both traditional paper media, digital media, and social media at the same time to strengthen their cause, albeit with different purposes in mind. Traditional paper media as in the case of newspapers’ “Letters to the Editors” column, the structure of the work is more formal and based on facts, but it tends to be aggressive and turn towards a slanderous or libelous nature. However, it was emphasized that...