Let the Music Play

According to Joe Pignato, assistant professor at SUNY Oneonta, the music industry is not dead. However, the record industry is. In a time where everything is digital and no one buys CD's anymore, it is hard for a new artist to come out with a single and actually make a profit off of it. With the birth of Napster and other peer to peer torrents, more and more people are simply downloading music from other peoples shared files. However, many people report that they often purchase a band's CD after hearing their downloads. Ultimately, I believe that music downloads could help the record industry. If artists find a way to put their music out for free on sites such as Rhapsody and Pandora, more people will be exposed to their art, making an impact on the artists career. Selling recordings, playing live concerts, and selling merchandise such as T-shirts will always be a lucrative business for artists. Overall, artists will always find ways to make money and will keep the industry alive despite its current downfall.

The News is not Dead

I do not believe that the news is dead. On the contrary, I think the news is evolving into its next stage. Sam Pollock, editor of Oneonta's Daily Star seemed very confident that the newspaper industry will not die. Newspapers might "die" as a hard source, but newspaper companies will continue through their websites. Periodicals such as The New York Times are charging costumers for the news and are doing quite well. The News has become something that is "winged" because we have instant access to stories on the internet. The digital age gives news companies the opportunity to release a story and update it as additional information surfaces. Online periodicals also expose you to additional stories through suggestions. Cell phone journalists are emerging and saving the news because they are an unlimited source to the news companies. Now, everyone can generate news, whether on their cell phones or on social sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

The Media's New Participatory Nature

In Dana Boyd’s book, Csikszentmihalyi, he argues that people are happiest when they can reach a state of "flow." For the last few centuries, we have been living in an era of broadcast media. Most recently, however, we have been switching to an era of networked media. We as a society have changed this “flow”. We now use social networking as a means of obtaining and distributing information. Henry Jenkins states in a study that more than half of American teens online have produced media content and about a third have circulated media that they have produced beyond their immediate friends and family. Those who are most enamored with services like Twitter talk passionately about feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in-tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate. As our information ecosystem evolves, we will see some radical changes take place. Boyd states that if we are going to try to get in-flow with information, we need to understand how information flows differently today. He breaks it down into four challenges where technological hope and reality collide (Democratization, Stimulation, Homophily, and Power). Jenkins states these issues can not be understood through a simple opposition between digital natives and digital immigrants, but rather require us to dig deeper into the diverse range of experiences young people have online and the range of different interactions between adults and teens in these new participatory culture. Overall, as we continue to move from a broadcast model of information to a networked one, we will continue to see re-workings of the information landscape, thus changing how our media will be handled in the future.