Death of Print: The decline of print and traditional medias? is a a research project by Matthew Carlin a BA Multimedia Student at Nottingham Trent University, UK. The research is looking into the apparent decline of traditional media as reported by some media organisations, and will evaluate whether traditional media is still a viable format in the 21st century.
Want more info or want to comment? E-mail Me
Digital Media: The death of print and traditional medias?
Well, has digital media lead to the demise of traditional media? Looking at the evidence in this report, it would be fair to answer this question as no; digital media has not lead to the death of print and traditional medias, at least not at this current point in time.
Admittedly though, as we have seen from the evidence in this report, there is certainly a trend towards the use of digital media, especially in everyday life. This however seems to be coming as a generalisation from the younger age groups. The evidence of this is in the chapter “Does digital media now play a part in everyday life?” This shows that for the 16-20 age groups and the 21-30 age groups that the amount of hours they use the internet for is above the amount of hours they watch TV. It would be interesting to do this same report in another 10 years to see if those who are currently in the 21-30 age group have taken the media habits with them. This evidence also shows that there is to at least some extent a generation gap in the use of digital media, older people are tending to stick the traditional medias that they know and have grown up with.
The report would also argue that traditional media is still a viable format in the 21st Century. As we have seen from this report digital media such as the internet can replicate the traditional medias in what Bolter refers to as “remediation” (Bolter 2000) and we have seen in the first chapter and the case study that digital media does have advantages over traditional medias such as the characteristic of registrational interactivity possessed by digital media. Even with these advantages however, digital media has still not taken traditional medias place at least for the majority. This may be different in the future but digital media will have to overcome problems first, digital media in general is still relatively expensive meaning people such as the poor will not be able to access digital media as well as traditional media where televisions can be bought relatively cheaply and where newspapers are cheap to read compared with the cost of buying a computer and having to pay for the cost of an internet connection every month. Measures to combat this have seen free internet access becoming available in public libraries, but then there are still disadvantages to this, there is little or no ability to be able to personalise the computer so if you had your favourite bookmarks for example you would still have to carry these around. This looses one of the advantages of digital media as it has the ability to personalise itself and shape itself to that of the user. This problem can also be seen in developing countries where they have no infrastructure in place to able to communicate or power digital media, so there is virtually no internet access (internetworldstats.com 2006), this mean that in those countries digital media is basically non existent, this is another one of the reasons why digital media has not yet lead to the demise of traditional media, it is much easier to give a person of the developing world a printed piece of paper with an image on that to try and power a laptop, then teach them how to use it before seeing the image. If developing countries can get these infrastructures in place we may see a larger shift in the use of digital media globally.
We will also not see the death of traditional medias totally, at least for the foreseeable future. Traditional medias will adapt just as they have done every time a new media was introduced, people said cinema and radio wouldn’t last after the success of television, but they did, they evolved and are still successful, and radio is infact enjoying somewhat of resurgence as more and more people are listening to radio over the internet, as reported by the Guardian (Guardian 2006). The same thing happened when the recordable tape cassette came out, people said that it would kill music but as we have seen it hasn’t and is still successful today. Traditional media will involve and become more interconnected with digital media, we have seen this in the likes of the BBC promoting the use of podcasts and there website whilst broadcasting on the traditional medias such as TV.
The other problem of digital media currently, and one that is holding it back is the fact there are so many different formats and standards for a variety of aspects connected to digital media, there are different operating systems, and if you do something on one you might not be able to open it on the other, there are currently 3 different standards for wi-fi, a,b and g. and on top of that there are two different security protocols for wi-fi. We have seen the success when manufacturers and software makers support just one format, look at the success of the MP3 format, this is a format which is platform independent, software has been written for windows, OS X, Linux and even hardware like mobile phones. Most manufactures tend to push only the technology they created and argue that theirs is better whilst forgetting to leave out support for other technologies which are as equally as good, for example, in windows, there is the video format, .wmv, this is only playable in windows and so if you have a different operating system you can’t view it. If digital media is to truly take the place of traditional media it needs to have standards that are agreed and accepted by everyone. Printed material is not restricted to a certain few because they happen to have the write operating system; anyone who can see can read it. This is what digital media needs to do if it is to truly take the place of traditional medias.
It would be interesting to do a report like this in 10 years time to see if the results and findings, in 10 years time will digital media have overcome its problems to enable it finally lead to the demise of traditional medias? Only time will tell.
So for now, has digital media lead to the decline of print and traditional medias? The answer is no.