Hi, I'm Anne Kruger from the Journalism and
Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong.
I'd like to begin our discussion with a brief overview of how
technological changes have influenced the way we get news.
In today's digitally connected world, many of us no longer need to look for
news to stay up to date.
Instead, news follows us everywhere.
The latest information is at our fingertips all the time.
Our patterns of media consumption have changed dramatically in the last
decade or so.
For the first time in human history, we're living in a world where everyone can be
a news producer with the power to disseminate information to the public.
For example, a video clip you shot on the bus can trigger national and international
conversation about social issues such as sexual violence and women's rights.
Journalists from a big news organization can give you some valuable tips about your
next vacation.
But so, too, can many ordinary travelers through online reviews.
Some of those reviews are in fact more trustworthy in some cases,
although there are a lot of unreliable user reviews as well.
When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type 500 some years ago,
the printing press made book publishing faster, easier, and cheaper.
Before Gutenberg, it took one year for a scribe, typically a monk,
to replicate a bible with a quill pen and ink.
But Gutenberg's invention could produce 50 books per week.
At the time, there were only 122 books in the Oxford University Library.
50 years later there were 10 million books in circulation in Europe.
The printing press technology transformed society and
created a mass communication model.
It made it possible for information and
ideas to spread widely to the public and capture the masses.
Later technologies such as photography, audio recording, and
movie films added images and sound to the text-based media landscape,
which led the way to broadcasting technology that
epitomizes the mass communication that existed before the Internet.
Not so long ago printed words, TV shows and
radio programs were what people relied on to get news.
That era of mass communication was a top down, one way transmission of news and
information from established media outlets to the passive mass audience.
It existed separately from the personal, two way communication that we had
through face to face conversations, letters, and telephone calls.
The Internet has amalgamated almost all aspects of media technologies of the 20th
century.
It introduced a new paradigm.
On this platform we're now capable of having both mass and
personal communication simultaneously.
Social media, in particular, has made it easier for us to have both personal and
group conversations that could influence and
impact the public in the same way that the mass media used to.
The consumers of mass media content now also are the producers of media content.
On Twitter, for example, hashtags consolidate news, announcements, opinion,
activism, entertainment, propaganda, photos and videos on any given topic,
creating a mashup of information and misinformation.
Hashtags such as #ArabSpring, #BlackLivesMatter, and
#UmbrellaRevolution have become an essential tool for people
who'd like to know more about the social movements and join the public dialogue.
At the same time however, the new communication model for
getting the information also made it much harder to comb through facts,
opinions, and fabrication, because the news cycles in the age of social media
has posed its unique challenges.
What do I mean?
Well that's the topic of discussion in the next lecture.