My Experience with New Media

To start with, the connections I have with media (the new and traditional ones) is quite high for me, as I have a bachelor degree in journalism and public relations studies and also I have worked in a multitude of organizations active in the media sphere (newspapers, magazines, communication offices).

As my bachelor thesis focused on the newspaper-based advertisements and their changes during the on-going recession, my master thesis will focus on the expected and proven outcomes of using social media in a company’s communication strategies. Basically I want to research how Estonian firms use social media (web 2.0 applications) in the interest of their communicative goals and what are the benefits that the communication offices see in doing that – and – are there really any?

What I hope to achieve through this course and more over my studies in the New Media fields is the support of an academic knowledge to what I already know. That is – we should use more and more new media to spread our message, we should do this in a partnership with the consumer, more correctly the collaborator and yet, we can and have to do this being the sole leader of the message (intended outcome of our message is always planned, and can and must be reached by the communicator). I know that this belief has great opposition by the traditional understanding (nothing can’t be controlled, once published on the web), but when a communicator accepts that belief, then he or she should disappear from the internet all together, as the web will definitely turn hostile towards his or her goal in one point or another. The skills and knowledge of dealing that hostility is where I want to excess.

The reading material was quite interesting for me to read, as basically 1 year of my bachelor studies was focused on how to use media research methods and why to use them, and yes – the internet was exactly seen as a sort of add-on media to the traditional channels. I agree on the term that media studies as one knew it are over. There is no point of researching a newspaper when more than half of the auditorium “consumes” it through web.

And this is the prelude to my cemented belief that there is no point of media-studies what so ever anymore. I know I’m being harsh, but there cannot be really any time-related or knowledge-related value in researching for example some blogs or Twitter accounts.

I believe that media research will be more and more overtaken by empirical studies of our interceptions (how to we see and use the web) and cognitive studies (what colors to use on what words etc.). This is of course more elaborate but for the sake of not commenting on things I haven’t really academically studied (yet), I’ll finish my comments for now.

Reading

David Gauntlett 'Media Studies 2.0'. http://www.theory.org.uk/mediastudies2.htm