Summary of Media Revolution

The Media Revolution was a documentary about the decline of newspapers in sales and also how some newspapers embraced the digital world. It was known that in 2009 the daily newspapers lost 2.25 Million reader in the past 10 years. Individual it was known the Mirror lost 750,000 readers, the Sun lost 400,000 readers and the Sunday papers have lost 500,00 readers.

This documentary also had information on how advertising effects the newspapers. A lot newspapers are losing many advertisers due to the decline in the numbers of people buying newspapers. To combat the drop in advertisements in newspapers they have raised the cover price on the papers in order to make up for the loss in money from advertisers.

Digital Economy Act

On the 8^th June 2010 the Digital Economy Bill came into force. This is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom regulating digital media and was introduced by Lord Mandelson. This act established a law, which aims to make it much easier to track down and sue persistent users of illegal downloading.

Infringers of this law will receive a letter notifying them of their infringement of the law and will be warned that if they continue this behaviour legal action will be taken. If they are caught again they are given another warning and if they then continue they will receive a final letter and then if they do not stop then their ISP can legally give the rights holder, the owners illegally downloaded item, a copyright infringement list. The rights holder can then approach a judge to gain a court order to identify some or all of the subscribers on the list and then take legal action against the illegal downloader.

This act is made to protect record companies and their bands but there are actually bands and musicians out there who oppose this act. Such people like Kate Nash, who’s career stemmed from free downloads from the website Myspace, and Billy Bragg are opposed to the act as they view the act as self defeatist as how Bill Bragg puts it in an interview with the BBC show Panorama “It’s like going out and taking away every ones music players and complaining that now one is buying and CD’s”.

Democratising information

Web 2.0 allows people to become amateur journalists, letting them post information to the web using websites such as Blogger. This ties into peering as well as free creativity as people can create articles to share with friends or larger groups of people and even the entire Internet. An example of this Internet journalism and democritising of information would be wikileaks and the recent leaking of the secret documents from the US government. This means that the internet allows for a new age of freedom of information, that even government documents to be leaked onto the internet for everyone to see.

Another example of Internet journalism could be wikipedia as it allows anyone to gather research and edit articles effectively letting anyone to contribute to the massive only encyclopedia.

Peering

Is applied mostly to social networks like facebook and Twitter where you can send links and messages to your friends about the latest songs, video’s or comedy sketch. This is a good advantage for businesses trying to get their artists and songs out there; this can also be done through emails such as hotmail and google mail, however this sort of sharing to peers is also bad for people who want to protect their intellectual property, because once it’s on the internet it’s anyone’s for the taking.

Web 2 means that these sort of things can be sent around much faster than in the past and become better known by the world. This means that we are the creator’s of the news and media in the modern age; we are the givers and revivers of the news because most countries have the Internet and can say what is happening in their countries. So these links and video’s can be sent as many times as humanly possible to friends and the world.

Corporations and businesses are forced to respond to these changed like having facebook and twitter accounts for their business to survive if not it is likely to perish because ‘peers’ can send this sort of info to each other and through social networking these businesses can become huge. It is shown that the Internet is not just a fad but a tool that can make business powerful and well known around the world if using the right sites.

Free Creativity

This is the natural process and progression of the online free market today. Web 2.0 gives us the tools that allow people to be as creative as they possibly can, in the forms of the websites such as YouTube and flickr people can now post their own home made videos online for the world to see and Flickr gives he opportunity for people to post their photos online for anyone to view.

This an idea from the Five Big Ideas of Wikinomics ties in well with another idea and that is the idea of peering. These two ideas fit together as both bring up the question of how people protect their IP (Intellectual Property). Anyone posting videos on YouTube is posting their own IP and this available for anyone to watch and then if they so chose to copy the original persons idea. For example there are many commentators of games on YouTube and they have all watched videos of others and thought to themselves “I want to do that”, and so they start there own YouTube channel and so have in a way copied the very first person to commentate on a game but they don’t copy the entire thing, they will have their own way of communicating to their subscribers and their own game play for the video.

It is so difficult to regulate the online “remix” creativity, as there is no real way to protect people’s own products online. Take music videos as an example, on YouTube there are many music videos from bands and a lot of people want to re create or “remix” the product by making their own video for the song, this is controlled by the record companies blocking the track, as they have not given permission to use the song. We encountered such problems when making our music videos for our Media Studies lesson even though we emailed the owners of the songs for permission to use them but received no reply. The Only way around this was for our Media tutor to actually point out that it was for educational purposes.

The Long Tail Theory

The Long Tail Theory is a term that was coined by Chris Anderson in the year 2006 that has gained popularity in the last few years. It is a retailing concept describing the strategy that retailers use, this is the niche strategy, retailers sell a large number of unique items in small quantities whilst also selling fewer popular items in larger quantities. The name long tail comes from the longer, flatter, low end of the market, as demonstrated by the end of the graph above. We can say the long tail theory in short is buying more of less and less of more.

As an example an old game on the Sega Mega Drive can be really hard to find in any where but specialist shops but in recent years retro games such as Earthworm Jim or Golden Axe can be easily found with but a few clicks of a mouse when searching online.

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