Blog Post 7

3. Do you think people today use the mass media differently compared with how people used media 10 or 20 years ago?

The way people use media nowadays has definitely changed compared to 10 years ago. Overall, we have so much more power over our media consumption. We can choose which device to watch the media on, from smartphones and tablets on the go to traditional TVs and computers. We also have a choice over which platforms we want to use to consume traditional media. With Hulu and Netflix, we can choose what shows or movies to watch whenever we want to watch it. Other than traditional media, there's new media such as podcasts, vines and youtube videos. Podcasts allow us to listen to something we would traditionally watch. Youtube changed the way we view media because all of the content is user-generated, so viewers have more control than ever before. Vines are short clips that are symbolic of how our culture has become so fast paced that we no longer have the attention span to watch a video that is more than a few minutes long. However, the short length of Vines make them easier to share, which is why so many of them go viral. With all these new innovations, the downside is the information overload, where we cannot focus on one thing because there's too much information we are able to consume. Some aspects that have remained the same are the uses and gratifications behind why we consume media in the first place and the effects media has on us as a society. The most important uses and gratifications are still enjoyment, amusement and connectivity. The effects are the same and maybe even more so, now that there is so much media to choose from and we can take it with us wherever we go.There is still much yet to be known in the realm of effects of new media, since not much research has been done on it yet.