New Media Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

New Media - Essay ExampleWith all the praises heaped on the ability of the Internet to empower people, the facts insure us a different story. In 1999, an investigation by the United Nations Development Program nominate that only 2.5% of the worlds population was connected to the Internet and approximately one quarter of the digitally connected in the world resided in one country the United States. (cited in Buckingham & Willett 2006, p. 252) More recently, modify global statistics report have been published by the International Telecommunications Union that of the 141 million Internet hosts crossways the globe, 106.2 are in the United States and a mere 0.274 million in Africa. (p. 252)Furthermore, while the new media, in particular in the area of information technology, provides us enabling benefits, it is important to underscore that technological developments are themselves regulate by neighborlyly bound perceptions of the needs, interests, and purposes that technology serv es. According to Judy Wajcman, technology is always a form of social knowledge, practices and products. It is the result of conflicts and compromises, the outcomes of which depend primarily on the distribution of power and resources between different groups in society. (cited in Goggin & Newell 2003, p. 3) The growing primacy of commercial motivations for the Internet over access is a case in point. The information superhighway, put out James Everett Katz and Ronald E. Rice, is little more than a new medium for corporate American to control and meshing from. They argued that the principle behind the national information infrastructure was grounded in privatization and commercialization. (p. 24) Here, access to information is no continuing a central presumption of human needs essential to citizenship rather, consumer interests have become the fundamental destiny in order for the evaluation of the performance of social systems. The technologies that are tagged with