JOUR1111 Lecture 2.0

Did you see what I did there? With the 2.0? Because we’ll be discussing the different iterations of the web? You got it? Am I trying too hard? 

This is quite a long post so I'll put this here, TL;DR: 

• Old media is tv, radio, newspapers and magazines. 

• There are three types of web: 

• Web 1.0 - about advertising
• Web 2.0 - about social media 
• Web 3.0 -  about information

• Hyperlocalisation is when the internet tracks what you like and dislike so it can give you what you like. This could be good or bad

Now on to the post!

My second lecture in the Introduction to Journalism and Communication course I actually missed, because I was stuck in my house with the only road leading out flooded over. And boy, was that disappointing, once I listened to the lecture and found out YOU ALL GOT JELLY BEANS.

I hope you enjoyed them guys. Truly sincere here. And by sincere I mean I’m still jealous two weeks later and by enjoy I mean I hope you only got the liquorice and coffee bean flavours.

But back to media!

Bruce started off by giving us a brief overview on ‘old’ media, also known by some other synonyms that aren’t as brutal as ‘old’. Like ‘traditional’, ‘heritage’ and ‘legacy’ media. But don’t be fooled, because these phrases all refer to the same forms of media, namely,

·      Newspapers

·      Magazines

·      Radio

·      Television

These mediums are also known as Mass Communication.

And then he gave us some quotes!

“Old media (traditional media, heritage media, legacy media) are media platforms that were essentially derived from an industrial paradigm. Created and developed in the late 19^th and first half of the 20^th centuries these platforms – newspapers, magazines, radio and television – are essentially instruments of mass communication targeting large aggregated audiences, albeit within their own specific markets.”

Harrison (2009:9)

They're reading about the 'mysterious' disappearance of their next door neighbor.

Basically, the “old” media was very much a mass method of conveying information, that was broadcasted to everybody. However that method of media coverage has changed as the internet was developed and its potential was realised. This lead into a discussion of:

Web 1.0

This was the first generation of ‘new’ media – this was the information web. As a form of media/communication, it focussed mainly on advertising.

“Web 1.0 (the information web) the one we all know and love, is straight forward. It’s full of content that we can surround with ads, mainly in the form of banners. Many marketers look at this as an extension of offline media – print and television. Sadly, the tend to use it the same way.”

Greg Smith (2009, cited in Harrison:10)

The focus of Web 1.0 was very much on the companies and those making the ads.

This changed with the development of Web 2.0, also known as the ‘social’ web. As is probably obvious from the title, web 2.0 focussed on social groups, and was far more interactive than web 1.0. Web 2.0 also saw more user-generated content than ever before, helped enormously by social networking sites such as

·      Facebook

·      Twitter

·      MSN

·      Myspace (RIP)

·      LinkedIn

·      Skype

·      Flickr

·      Tumblr (rule 1 of Tumblr is you do not talk about Tumblr)

I'd say RIP but I'm pretty sure people want Myspace to die a slow death.

Web 2.0 also saw the creation of new words – words the creator shouldn’t have been proud enough to put into general use. The main new phrase we have to come to terms with is ‘Prod-Users’.

As you can probably guess, it’s just ‘producers’ and ‘users’ smooshed together, to imply they are on and the same. This relates back to the concept of ‘user-generated content’.

“Produsage can be roughly defined as modes of production which are led by users or at least crucially uses users as producers – in other words, the user acts as a hybrid user/producer, or produser, virtually throughout the production process. Produsage demonstrates the changed content production value chain model in collaborative online environments: in these environments, a strict producer/consumer dichotomy no longer applies – instead, users are almost always able to be producers of content, and often necessarily so in the very act of using it.”

Web 3.0 changed the game just as everyone was getting used to it’s older generations. Also known as the ‘semantic’ web, web 3.0 was about making sense of the information received.

“Web 1.0, was of course, the static flat web of hyperlinks and no interaction. Web 2.0 (ignoring the glossy mirrored logos and missing vowels [flickr etc]) is what we currently have. It’s the interactive web of comments on blogs, social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, microblogging (Plurk, Twitter, and the late Pownce), and all kinds of tools that converted the static flat land of html into the scrubbed dynamic web we all know and love(?) today.

Web 3.0 takes all this a step further adding machine-readable information to the packets of information. It is thus known to the technically minded as the semantic web. Once it is manifest it will take us to within a gnat’s whisker of that utopia in which you have exact change for a trip from Mornington Crescent to LAX via JFK.

Before we get there though, there is the not-so-simple matter of enabling meaning within information sources. This concept brings us full circle to the early days of web design when every tool stressed the importance of metatags.”

David Bradley 2009

Orwell would be rolling in his grave if he knew what most people thought Big Brother was now.

Web 3.0 made the most extensive use of meta-tagging – a type of HTML tag that gives search engines information about the page. Unlike normal tags, meta tags don’t affect how the page is displayed. Instead, meta tags provide search engines with information about the page’s author, how often they update it, and key words in the page. This was extremely useful for search engines, and is basically what Google uses when indexing pages.

The semantic web focuses very much on being mobile and portable, and focuses not on companies and advertisers but on the individual.

But what do web iterations mean for news?

A key point Bruce raised was about something called ‘I’ve seen hyperlocalisation described as “customizing online services to local markets”. Basically, the sites you use collect information about you, to better personalise the  advertisements, news, etc, they throw at you, so you’re more likely to click on them or buy what they’re selling. Here are a few of the key points Bruce raised about it.

Pluses

·      Specific content delivery

·      “News my way” – caters what it delivers for used based on the profile it’s developed on you, based on what you do on the net – means advertising offered can be specifically catered to you.

·      Gets rid of the general ignorance on consumers.

·      This gives you the news that you want (it doesn’t just cater advertisments to your tastes, but also what content, information, news, etc that you see)

Minuses

·      Doesn’t give you any other information – can become ignorant and can enhance ethnocentricity.

·      If you get too specific with your news, you can miss out on the big picture, and lose general knowledge of what’s going on.

This has nothing to do with journalism or the media. I just think "woman struggling to drink water" is hilarious".
There's hundreds more of these out there.

 

What do my fellow JOUR1111 students think about the hyperlocalisation and –personalisation that’s occurring in web 3.0? Is it yet more proof that our computers will eventually rise up and overthrow us all, or is it just a better way to get they information you want?