Lecture delivered by Dr.

Subir Maitra, Registrar, Rabindra Bharati University at the

One-day International Seminar on “Mass Media in the Era of Digitisation: Challenges
and Opportunities” organised by the Department of Mass Communication &
Videography, Rabindra Bharati University on 28thof February, 2019.

The word media is, a Latin plural form of the singular noun medium, meaning an intervening substance
through which somethingis conveyed or transmitted. Mass media are tools for the transfer of
information, concepts, and ideas to both general and specific audiences. Television, newspapers, music,
movies, magazines, books, billboards,radio, broadcast satellites, and the Internet are all part of the mass
media.

We live in a digital era, which can be described in various aspects: the digitalization of analogue
information storage, the emergence of web society, the replacement of the vertical mass
communication model with horizontal social networks, the decrease in the influence of traditional
media. The mass media in the digital world is confronting with opportunities and challenges.

In digital communication, images, texts, and sounds are converted (encoded) into electronicsignals
(represented as varied combinations of binary numbers—ones and zeros) that are thenreassembled
(decoded) as a precise reproduction of, say, a TV picture, a magazine article, a song, or a telephone
voice. On the Internet, various images, texts, and sounds are all digitallyreproduced and transmitted
globally.New technologies, particularly cable television and the Internet, developed so quickly
thattraditional leaders in communication lost some of their control over information.

Oral culture has been further reinvented by the emergence of social media—such asTwitter and, in
particular, Facebook, born on February 4, 2004 in a dormitory at Havard, which now has nearly one
billion users worldwide. The Facebook tapped into people’s instinctivedesire to see and be seen. Few
companies have exerted such a strong influence on society, changing people’s communication habits,
reuniting lost contacts, shaping their perception of world events and redefining the meaning of the
word “friend”.

Socialmedia allow people from all over the world to have ongoing online conversations, share storiesand
interests, and generate their own media content. This turn to digital media forms has
fundamentallyoverturned traditional media business models, the ways we engage with and
consumemedia products, and the ways we organize our daily lives around various media choices.
The digital era also brought about a shift in the models that media researchers have usedoverthe years
to explain how media messages and meanings are constructed and communicatedin everyday life. In
one of the older and more enduring explanations of how media operate,mass communication has been
conceptualized as a linear process of producing and deliveringmessages to large audiences. Senders
(authors, producers, and organizations) transmitmessages (programs, texts, images, sounds, and ads)
through a mass media channel (newspapers,books, magazines, radio, television, or the Internet) to large
groups of receivers (readers,viewers, and consumers). In the process, gatekeepers(news editors,
executive producers,and other media managers) function as message filters. Media gatekeepers make
decisionsabout what messages actually get produced for particular receivers. The process also allowsfor
feedback, in which citizens and consumers, if they choose, return messages to senders orgatekeepers
through phone calls, e-mail, Web postings, talk shows, or letters to the editor.

A more contemporary approach to understanding media is through a cultural model. This

conceptrecognizes that individuals bring diverse meanings to messages, given factors and
differencessuch as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, and occupation. In this model of
masscommunication, audiences actively affirm, interpret, refashion, or reject the messages andstories
that flow through various media channels.

While the linear model may demonstrate how a message gets from a sender to a receiver,the cultural
model suggests the complexity of this process and the lack of control that “senders”(such as media
executives, moviemakers, writers, news editors, and ad agencies) oftenhave over how audiences receive
messages and interpret their intended meanings. Sometimes,producers of media messages seem to be
the active creators of communication while audiencesare merely passive receptacles. Consumers
alsoshape media messages to fit or support their own values and viewpoints. This phenomenon isknown
as selective exposure: People typically seek messages and produce meanings that correspondto their
own cultural beliefs, values, and interests. For example, studies have shownthat people with political
leanings toward the left or the right tend to seek out blogs or newsoutlets that reinforce their pre-
existing views.

The rise of the Internet and social media has also complicated the traditional roles in both thelinear and
the cultural models of communication. While there are still senders and receivers, theborderless,
decentralized, and democratic nature of the Internet means that anyone can become asender of media
messages—whether it’s by uploading a video mash-up to YouTube or by writinga blog post. The Internet
has also largely eliminated the gatekeeper role. Although some governmentstry to control Internet
servers, and some Web sites have restrictions on what can and cannotbe posted, for the most part, the
Internet allows senders to transmit content without first needingapproval from, or editing by, a
gatekeeper.

Security of the user is a major problem in digital platform. It’s a Challenge to keep PersonalInformation
Private. When you use the Internet, whetheryou are signing up for Facebook account, reading
newspaper online, or watching a video on YouTube, you give away personal information—voluntarily or
not. As a result, government surveillance, onlinefraud, and unethical data-gathering methods have
becomecommon, making the Internet a potentially treacherous place.Since the inception of the
Internet, government agencies worldwidehave obtained communication logs, Web browser histories,
and theonline records of individual users who thought their online activitieswere private.
In addition to being an avenue for surveillance, the Internet is increasingly a conduit for onlinerobbery
and identity theft, the illegal obtaining of personal credit and identity information inorder to
fraudulently spend other people’s money. Computer hackers have the ability to infiltrateInternet
databases (from banks to hospitals to even the Pentagon) to obtain personal information. Identity theft
victimizes hundreds of thousandsof people a year.

Another challenge pertains to the question of what constitutes appropriate content online massmedia.
Often, politically biased, communally-sensitive, racist, controversial and derogatory post, hate speech or
news on online mass media create social tensions and problems.

One major challenge in this digital era relates to what is called Digital Divide. The term
digitaldividerefers to the growing contrast between the “information haves”—those who can affordto
purchase computers and pay for Internet services—and the “information have-nots”—thosewho may
not be able to afford a computer or pay for Internet services.The rising use of smartphones is helping to
narrow the digital divide.

Social media is also redefining the journalistic landscape through the creation of virtual communities.
Traditional news organizations cannot continue treating publishing on social media as a subordinate
activity to their core reporting. Instead, they need to integrate news coverage into their social media to
enhance its impact. Furthermore, many people now consider trends on social media to be as much
genuine news as ‘external’ events – this means that the very definition of what constitutes news is
changing. News organizations may need to draw in younger audiences through viral videos, or take
advantage of the eagerness of advertisers and brands to capitalize on social media.

One of the problems with social media is that stories are often not verified. After recent flooding in
China, newspapers used photographs from social media which turned out to have been taken a decade
earlier. Instances of newspapers or news agencies relying on social media sources that subsequently
prove to be false are growing in number.

Social media is also susceptible to deliberate manipulation by partisan interests. Information published
on such forums has frequently turned out to be false. In the absence of journalists to debunk rumours or
challenge propaganda, social media can destabilize political situations by contributing to misinformation
and scaremongering. More generally, countries in which information – or misinformation – is tightly
controlled by the government demonstrate the limits of social media as an alternative to journalism.

Nowadays, news will often appear first on social media. To an extent, this changes the role of formal
journalism, which will increasingly be to check, package and contextualize such information.Another
important potential role for journalism in the digital age will be to filter useful news from the vast array
of online information. Every minute, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. In this context the
role for journalists is to turn these isolated units of social content into compelling stories.