Does your case study suggest that new and digital media have had a positive impact by offering audiences a more diverse range of values and ideologies?
Developments within new and digital media, have seen both a negative and positive impact by offering audiences a more diverse range of values and ideologies. A lot of the times, the audience discover new and dominant ideologies from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Nowadays, the negative effects people may debate on is that we cannot trust the internet because anyone has the freedom to write whatever they wish to and therefore brings up a more recent argument, 'Fake News'.
From a Marxists perspective, many of the users online and a considerable amount of users would say that the internet is corrupt and we would believe anything that would be said. For example, recently there is a lot of talks about Fake News and to some extent it is misleading; We have weekly news articles on how Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg would talk about how they are trying to prevent this from happening but has been going on for ages. To some extent, fake news is true as anyone has the option to write whatever they would like to and all they need is a social media account and they are good to go. Theorists such as Andrew Keen mentions that "webpages and blogs are like million monkeys typing nonsense". This also gets the users thinking on how accurate the internet really is and how it isn't all a big lie. Different bloggers have their own opinions and therefore, user's may be confused on which source they would want to believe and could potentially believe in the wrong one. This brings a negative effect as users are being fed misleading information.
On the other hand, a pluralist may think that new and digital media is offering audiences a positive impact by feeding them diverse rang of values and ideologies from the use of citizen journalists and user-generated content. A lot of the time, people would say that citizen journalists aren't reliable at all considering they have the power to right whatever they want therefore this is the ideology (citizen journalists are all misleading). However, we have a more accurate reading and now believe that actually, citizen journalists are very useful as they can help the government in many different scenarios. For example with the Ian Tomlinson case. This is where a group of police officers had beaten a normal by passer which causes severe injuries which was the lead to his death. However, the police officers said that he was one of the main people who were causing the trouble, little did they know that everything that happened on that day was recorded by another member of public. Therefore, not only does it show a strong case for having citizen journalists, considering it can help out the government etc but it can also highlight the difference between what it right and wrong. So, overall citizen journalists and user-generated content can be shown as a positive as it proves the negative minded people that they shouldn't believe what others think about citizen journalists but to try and find out by themselves. Furthermore, McLuhan's 'global village' is a great concept to understand the terms of globalisation and this concept of unity within the world. However, it can also be argued that due to the rise of globalisation, there is now a lack of local journalism, therefore cultural imperialism takes over and American news for example becomes more important and significant. Due to this lack of journalism, the local news stories published become ones of mere opinion polls and ones to generate interest rather than significance.
In addition to that, Snapchat is another type of institution that has a positive effect on the audience. Snapchat has just recently come to life and many may say that Snapchat is just another useless social media site which is just a way of 'dumbing down' the world. However, recently we have seen an increase of people using it everyday with 158 million people on it. Furthermore, Snapchat has been able to find a brand new way of users communicating to each other which is via images or videos. Twitter has allowed for the creation of many communities, notably “Black Twitter” in which users challenge racial discrimination and discuss social and political issues to raise awareness. Alongside this movements have formed, a prime example of this is the BlackLivesMatter movement which has had a prominent presence on Twitter. Due to the “trending” mechanism on Twitter, more people have come across the values and ideologies of social movements such as BlackLivesMatter. Twitter has enabled audiences to therefore initiate campaigns such as 'Black Lives Matter' and therefore allows audiences to collectively aid positive images of black identity. A more recent case is the 15 year old boy, who was shot by a police officer which was filmed on officers body cameras in Texas. A lot of the time, businesses may use this app as they would believe that it is less time consuming. Therefore, this then leads to the fact of which people on the internet are not to be trusted.
However, a Marxist would also believe that the term Americanisation from new and digital media.This is shown as a negative because of the fact that the internet shows that everyone is trying to act as an American. British people want to be more American and so forth. This also leads to the fact that the internet is dumbing down its users and hasn't done anything in which it is benefiting the audience. A key example of 'dumbing down' would be the most watched YouTube video, Gangnam Style. Furthermore, another example was when an ISIS member recorded a beheading video which included graphic torture content which is easily accessible online, which reveals the negative impact of new and digital media, enabling extremists to showcase their ideologies. Although footage is unedited, aiding audiences with 'surveillance' (Blumler + Katz, Uses and Gratifications theory), it can also be argued that it is extremely easy to manipulate footage and an image, evidently proven by 3 British males who posted a picture on Facebook saying they were in Syria. Before new and digital media came to life, people would be more keen on looking at what the latest news is or what the weather forecast may be, but nowadays, the audience are more keen on looking at a childish video with adults dancing like a five year old.
To conclude, new and digital media has had both a negative and positive impact on the audience by giving them beliefs and values. It gives the audience a positive impact as they can possibly be that one person that could tell the whole online universe between what's right and wrong. However, the negative thing is that there are too many people on the internet that prefer to give the users misleading information (Fake News) which is a key debate on how this can be stopped. The question everyone asks themselves is that if this can actually be stopped considering the amount of users there are on the internet.
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