IT and Society: Past decade’s Top 10 Media Trends

Summing up trends of the past decade we may say: everything has changed due to Internet — business processes, distribution channels, audience, journalists.

1. Digital technologies replace analog ones.

Due to digital technologies and Internet the Mass Media structure changed extremely rapidly within a decade. Universal digitalization has changed data search basics as well.

2. Internet — an environment for Mass Media of today and tomorrow.

Not only has Internet become a part of a daily life for millions of people worldwide, but has nearly become a basic constituent of professional Mass Media. Internet serves an inexhaustible source of inspiration in terms of topic choice, but meanwhile poses major threat for all existing Mass Media.

3. Mobile Internet.

Cell phones are now widely used to access Internet apart from computers. They have become universal devices for digital media content consumption, provided instant message delivery, and enabled Mass Media to meet individual needs of each content consumer.

4. Blogs and social media as “personal Mass Media”.

The role of social networks in relation to media consists in the fact that media content is being distributed and consumed not the same it used to be in the pre- social networks era. Both blogs and social networks showed the whole world the “mob power” in the digital era, but perhaps, we still don’t apprehend the whole potential of current changes.

5. TV leaves for Internet.

Internet is changing many businesses, and apart from Print Media TV turned out to be the one to suffer dramatically. A case in point is YouTube, key TV and other content filter, which in 2006 was called the main invention of the year by Time magazine. On YouTube you can find almost any TV program, if it is really worth watching. Thanks to YouTube appeared a lot of singers, actors, showmen and even linguists who succeeded to find their audience here.

6. Internet-telephony: Skype.

Among others Internet has changed mobile operators business. In the field of local and international calls the leadership is being gained by Internet-telephony and its pioneer — Skype. Annually 40 million people all over the world make use of this service.

7. Decline of analog music and torrents.

Digital technologies jointly with Internet also had an impact on music industry. Music market decline happened with appearance of the first torrents, and audio- and video exchange ran out of control. The outcome of the decade — many-year-long struggle of authors and producers with providers, users and torrents themselves.

8. Wiki-technologies.

It goes without a doubt, that the birth of the wiki-technology has become a trend of the decade. This technology enables users to team up to jointly develop a website’s structure and content in the way which gives a chance to edit the text many times — with an opportunity to compare various versions and restore earlier ones. Using wiki-engine the website may be simultaneously edited by an indefinite number of users with no conflict arising between their versions.

9. E-books.

E-publishing boom kicked off after an invention of “e-ink” technology. Screens, developed following this technology, provide the image in reflected light, therefore eyes do not get tired, and, what is more, they are extremely power consumption efficient.

10. Creative Commons vs. traditional copyright: torrent trackers.

With development of Internet, when data copying and distribution is getting almost impossible to control, all the imperfections and lopsidedness of copyright legislation have become apparent to all those content producers, who wanted to distribute their content for free and without any restrictions. Right for these cases the US legislator Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons licenses in 2001.

Some of abovementioned trends have already settled and become such a reality, we can hardly imagine how we used to live without them. Others, on the contrary, entered our lives within the past year. Still it too early to assess any of them.