Digitalization Has Reshaped the Mass

¶ … Digitalization has reshaped the mass media

The advent of digitalization has brought with it many changes to the face of mass media, as society has traditionally known it. More than just advancement in available communications technology, digitalization and the subsequent utilization of digital technologies have induced changes in the way media content is produced and the way content is received, manipulated, and consumed.

Digitalization has exerted enormous pressure on the producers of media to shift and grow with the changing demands of digital communication. As the number of homes with computers and Internet access has increased nationally and globally, consumers have come to expect that media be available when and where it is convenient for them to access said media (Olson & Pollard, 2004). The newsroom or studio workflow becomes such that the priority is getting content broadcasted or posted on the Internet in real-time. To meet these demands, producers and journalists must become multi-skilled, or able to create, adapt, and amalgamate different types of content (Ashton & Cottle, 1999). As a result, the producer is necessarily a jack-of-all-trades and cannot devote time to creativity and thorough analysis. The quality and credibility of media suffers in the process.

Changes in the process of consumption are equally dramatic. Digitalization has resulted in a new flexibility of media. While forms of digital content converge - text with photographic images, or video with sound, for instance - the consumer has a greater ability than ever before to manipulate media - by cutting and pasting, or deriving new content from digital content available to them. As a result of this, the credibility of available content is nearly always dubious, as in the case of popular Internet encyclopedias in which content can be edited by anyone. The volume and subject range of information available to the consumer has grown and broadened (Featherstone & Venn, 2006), but the content is suspect, having sacrificed its sovereign authority.