New Media: Problems & Prospects

Abstract

In the present era new media or what we call www is a set of new technologies that become increasingly embedded in everyday use and is spreading very fast around the globe. Since its inception it is making tremendous efforts to educate, inform and persuade the masses globally. The new media is a form of mass media that includes Internet, podcasts, RSS feeds, social networks, text messaging, blogs, wikis, apps, virtual worlds and more. The term new media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the 80’s, with its emergence it slowly broken the geographical barriers for its users and turned the whole world into a global village by breaking the boundaries and frontiers, reaching every part of the world. The new media have consequences upon the social, political and economic values of people. With the growing dominance of the Internet, blog, chat, Social sites etc, the use of New Media has already begun and consequently, communication is rapidly changing and becoming mobile, interactive, personalized and multi-channel. Internet has served as a vehicle or as a channel to convey information in a useful and easy to understand manner. This extraordinary revolution is affecting the basic structure of societies we live in. New Media is considered as an important
source in helping the society in different spheres of life. New media hold out a possibility of on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as, interactive user feedback, creative participation and community formation around the media content. It is more technology driven on one hand and offer more control in the hands of user on the other hand. Although it has more positive qualities but at the same time it is also considered harmful for the users to some context. What distinguishes new media from traditional media is not the digitizing of media content into bits, but the dynamic life of the new media content
and its interactive relationship with the media consumer. This paper has discussed different positive and negative notions attached to the use of new media. The different forms of new media especially the Internet has become very important tool in India and the
world over among its users. Thus, the study aims at finding out the relevance of the new media and the problems/ prospects related to it. In this paper has discussed the effectiveness of New Media in day to day life. New Media here refers to the Internet in its newest version, Web 2.0 and mobile platforms.