Critical Writing Essay

Contemporary media offer unprecedented opportunities for a variety of content-producers. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this development?


The internet is a platform which in recent years has seen a growth in multimedia content being produced, not just by professionals, but also by amateurs. People who perhaps have never made anything like music or video before. There are expanding opportunities, but it’s not just the internet which is a platform for content production, there is a fast developing adoption of mobile technologies which allow for new ways to produce and distribute content to reach growing audiences. The main underlying reason behind the growth of content produced on, and for contemporary media platforms is the expansion and evolution of new technologies that are accessible and affordable, which allow any user with basic digital literacy skills to participate in creative ways of self-expression at a low cost.

There has been an eruption on a vast scale of new forms of creative content, due largely to advancements in technology. First of all the introduction of broadband high-speed internet connections which half of the populations of Europe, Americas, Asia etc. have access to, that can handle large sized files like video and audio content.
Typical content that you would come to expect being produced include video, audio, blogs, games, applications, social networking profiles, photographs and images, creative writing and anything that can take advantage of the platform it is on.
The internet as a platform for distributing and hosting media content has the potential of content producers being able to reach very large audiences over a large geographical area, and they incur very low costs.
Secondly, the technology to produce this content has become widely available and due to affordable prices, is very accessible by the public. Individuals have available access to a computer in developed countries, there are cheap recording devices, storage space is ever dropping in price, and affordable editing software has made it possible for individuals and bands to create and distribute their music and other works without the high costs of professional equipment or complexities of a ‘middle man’ between the producer’s content and distribution to the consumer.

These factors are helping individuals create projects straight from their bedroom. In October 2006, a woman named Stevie Ryan became a star through the uploading of a video to YouTube. She has become one of the top 100 video producers on YouTube of all time and her videos have been viewed well over a million times. Her fame came without the help of powerful, big-name producers, and due to her independent production and publishing of the content, she managed to reach totals of 25,000 viewers a week, without having to spend very much (Palfrey & Gasser 2008).
The iPhone is a perfect example of opportunities open to individuals and content creation for mobile devices. There are 30% more web searches from iPhones over rival smart-phones (Sweney 2009) showing a large mobile web use from owners. For development of applications directly for the platform, the software development kit was released free, meaning that anyone with a computer and broadband internet could download it and start developing for the iPhone and iPod touch. This gave opportunity to individuals who had never developed for an apple product, and individuals who had never developed software before, to start learning something new and open up endless creative possibilities with the devices. Apple launched an online store for the sale of submitted applications which has allowed for developers creating applications from their bedrooms or garages to sell their content on a global scale, serving the best and direct way of developers getting their content out to the collective tens of millions of users. There have been applications submitted to the app store by large game companies down to people who don’t have a large budget and big market plan.
One negativity to this is the restrictions as to what Apple will allow for submission to the store. Many apps have been rejected because of content Apple deem unsuitable, or for other reasons. They run a controlled system censoring content which restricts some developers from releasing their product
A young Malaysian boy of 9 years old, Lim Ding Wen, caught the attention of world press when he created an application for the device. In less than two weeks it had more than 4000 downloads, which shows the advantage to iPhone development is that really anyone can do it (BBC News 2009).
Websites such as YouTube, Vimeo or MySpace amongst others have helped many launch themselves as artists and find fame.
But alongside the advantages that these sites have for users creating work to express themselves and their beliefs and opinions and share them with others, there are negatives in how a large amount of content producers are motivated by the possibility of financial gain, and others are motivated to produce content purely aiming for fame.
To find material that is of high quality and is something special that stands out, there is a large amount of poor quality amateur work to get past.
But despite this, there is a wealth of choice to be found in content offered online.

If we follow video as the content produced by an individual, television is one means of distributing this content to an audience, but it is a medium that falls into Adorno’s ideology that it’s not effective at reaching people’s interests. It is produced following what is popular in culture, there is minimal choice and its distribution via a non-interactive, one-to-many medium doesn’t allow for any user participation. Television broadcasters manufacture content to reach a large scale audience whilst attempting to cater for broad tastes.
John Fiske’s view (1989, p.24) supports distribution and creation of content over contemporary media, with reference to the quote: “Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry.”
With mobile and online video opportunities, individuals are offered activity that goes beyond just consumption of content, they can use a multitude of technologies now and access and produce content themselves to suit their tastes and identity. Althusser’s ideology of interpellation allows us to see that the content a user is consuming will only be of use if it matches with their interpellated identity unconsciously. The media produced by individuals can connect to other people and be meaningful to them if it appeals to an assumed identity the user has adopted. The interpellation on an individual links them to a larger social grouping of others similarly interested in the same content.
There is diversity in the content available and advantages of being able to see other cultures and content suitable to your interests and tastes, although a disadvantage is that with the continual creation of more and more new content, there is beginning to be too much diversity, leading to an overload of information, and without viable resources to validate the information individuals consume, multiple perspectives may gain acceptance and cause social fragmentation (Palfrey & Gasser 2008).
Wikipedia is an example of an ongoing debate of quality as a source of information. Wikipedia and Wikis are a fantastic tool in multi-user authorship allowing different individuals to write/edit an article on a topic, collecting human knowledge digitally, although if one person writes a statement that can’t easily be verified, it will easily be accepted as the truth. A lot of young people, students and even businesses have come to rely on Wikipedia as a primary source of information, and it ranks among the top 12 most visited websites globally. The website has aroused concerns though regarding plagiarism and cheating, lack of credibility, slander and more.

Online collaboration does have some advantages. Virtual worlds can be created featuring a full operating economy and business structure, with users interacting simultaneously creating the experience.
Second Life is the biggest example of this working massive online community. The whole experience is created by the user, the game developer just offers the tools for the users to create their own virtual items such as tables, buildings, clothes, art. In this game users have an advantage of being able to be someone different, they are anonymous and can undertake any role, be it community leaders, game designers, entrepreneurs or DJs to name a few.

Digital creations and contemporary media is starting to focus around sharing. We are in a social and collaborative society and runs on the power of communities. The texts that are found on the web are not only shared by peers but are able to be manipulated. With access to technology and software, mixes and mash-ups have become common practice.
A lot of derivative works shared between peers consist of cut-ups, spoofs or parodies, machinima and fan fiction.
Sourcing for digital materials that can be mixed has allowed for digital content producers to develop and enhance their research skills. Even though these enhanced research skills and new forms of creativity are advantages, law plays a role.
There have been many court cases over the infringement of copyright, YouTube was sued by Viacom because users had uploaded clips of television shows to YouTube without permission, and the founders of thepiratebay.org have recently been caught in a legal battle with large media and film companies over the violation of copyright by users distribution of copyright material via BitTorrent.
There are still no clear legal issues surrounding digital content, which means that digital content producers are at risk for ongoing copyright liability.
Problems can arise from the creative re-use of copyrighted materials and the distribution via the common practice of illegal file-sharing. Which means that small individuals are constantly being targeted by the large corporations.
In conclusion the advantages for opportunities presented by contemporary media consist of public creation and contribution, wide range of views and perspectives able to be viewed by large audiences, accessibility to global content and an ever increasing list as new technologies arrive.
Disadvantages will always occur though through people’s misuse and defamation, constant regulation by law and appropriate bodies, and a constant reliability of online communication.




Word count: 1,655




Bibliography

BBC News, 2009. Nine-year-old writes iPhone code. BBC News.
Available from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7874291.stm [Accessed 24 March 2009]


Gauntlett, D., 2002. Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction. London: Routledge.


Palfrey, J. and Gasser, U., 2008. Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of digital natives. USA: Basic Books.


Sweney, M., 2009. Apple iPhone creates surge in mobile internet use. The Guardian.
Available from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/19/google-uk-street-view-iphone [Accessed 24 March 2009]



Further Reading

Bennett, W.L., 2007. Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age. Massachusetts: Institute of Technology.
Available from:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dmal.9780262524827.001 [Accessed 21 March 2009]


Tyron, C., 2007. New Media Studies and the New Internet Cinema. Michigan: University of Michigan Library.
Available from:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=postid;view=text;rgn=main;idno=pid9999.0005.102 [Accessed 21 March 2009]