Cultural pessimists

• Cultural pessimists


  • See the new media as having a negative effect on society.
  • New media is an evolution of traditional media rather than a revolution in media
• Cultural pessimists argue the media is still largely controlled by the elites in society and that despite the emergence of the new media companies, power has not been redistributed in this sector
• Cultural pessimists believe new media has led to unregulated capitalism, a lack of censorship and misinformation
• Conford and robins argue new media evolved from existing media, with traditional media sources utilising new technologies to maintain market share
• Jenkins argues most new media platforms are an extension of existing media giants
• New media has aided the spread of commercial interests within society, with access to the new media coming with targeted advertising as media companies collect data on individuals' preferences, habits and opinions and use algorithms to target individuals with goods and services
• The sheer number of people interacting across the internet makes it difficult to monitor content, leading to a growth in trolling and online abuse and changes to laws to combat abuse
• More information is not necessarily a good thing

  • There may be more information, more news channels and blogs, but a lot of this is just copied and modified slightly or recycled from other places.
  • Some of the information online may just be ‘fake news’ deliberately misleading to serve political aspects.
  • Constant news feeds can lead to us being distracted y the news rather than taking the time to look at one thing in depth.
  • As a result, we end up with a shallower understanding of the world. 
• Domination of media conglomerates

  • New media has come to be controlled by a handful of big tech companies. Ie. amazon, google.
  • These companies have invested hugely in the new media in the last decade, and they now control not only the access to social media sites but also search engines and the web servers which store our information. 
  • There are example of people being de-platformed without reason of YouTube and twitter, these people typically hold radical views, suggesting that these big companies actually determine who can express what on social media. 
• Reinforcing elite power

  • Larger political parties have more money to spend on advertising to keep their biased information at the top of the internet search engines such as google.
  • The most radical views are censored.
  • Politics is much less visible than entertainment on the internet, suggesting that critical political thought is drowned out more than ever before.
• Increasing consumption and commercialisation

  • The internet seems to have turned into a sphere of consumption where most of what we see is aimed at selling us something.
  • Companies such as amazon use the data we collect to find our preferences and sell it to advertising companies so they can target us and use ads more effectively, manipulating people to buy products.
  • It is estimated that 1/3 of all Amazon purchases are a result of ‘recommendations’.
• Turkle

  • Refers to the new media users as ‘cyborgs’ because they are always connected to each other, regardless of where they are via laptops, smartphones and tablets.
  • People now live full time on the web and are devoted to their communication devices, particularly their smartphones.
  • However, although new media has connected people it has also resulted in greater anxiety and isolation.