Influence of the Media

Throughout the history of mankind, the ability to communicate with others has been the top condition for both survival and community. The first known instance in which humans have tried to reach out for more than face-to-face communication were the cave drawings dating back to 15,000 BC (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2010). This indicates the importance of communicating with others even for the primitive race during these times.

            Now let us fast-forward a few thousand years to the age of technology and new techno-toys. The rate that in which technology advances is mind blowing and will only get faster. On a personal level the main form of New Media that I use, not only on a daily level but, on a hourly level is my smart phone. I use this device for all my contacts, calendar, and will even sometime use it to actually talk to someone on the phone. It is weird that something that derived from the old land line services can now be used for so much more than just to talk to people. As I am writing this I am at work in the local airport waiting to clock in and I currently have seven people around me in which all of them are on their phones in one way or the other. Not one of them are actually talking on the phone through. Other than using my phone for work or emergency reasons the next big way that I personally use my phone is to keep up with news of the world.

            At this time I am a full time supervisor and also taking two graduate level classes for working on getting my Masters of Arts degree. For this reason I do not have the time to get my news from the traditional sources of watching the news programs on the television of reading a newspaper. The main way that I get my information on either the events of the day or a news story is usually from my Facebook account. In this way I am able to pick which stories I am interested in and weather I want to spend the time to read it or not. Although this is my main source for news I am aware for the need to be cautious of what I read in the truthfulness. I do sometime find my viewpoint on any given story influenced by what others are saying on Facebook. I love to take in all the different viewpoints of others before I decide in full what I fell about any subject, but in the end I do lean toward what I believe is right within my soul.

            I do believe that social media and the different forms of new media are a positive aspect of influence. In this way the idea of always having to keep up with the technology, and that if we do not use all the available tools that we have. Janet Kolodzy call this idea “convergence journalism” in her book on this subject (Kolodzy, 2013). The tools that she mentions are the different new media tools such as video, graphics, and social media.

References

Kolodzy, J. (2013). Practicing Convergence Journalism-An Introduction to Cross-Media Storytelling. New York: Routledge.

Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2010). Blur: How To Know What's True In The Age Of Information Overload. New York: Bloomsbury.