Week 3, Mobile Technology

My blog for this week focuses mainly on the articles by Gordon (2007), Gillespie (2010), Orgad (2009), and Sooryamoorthy et al. (2008). I chose these articles because, unlike the article by Goggin and Spurgeon (2007) that deals mainly with technological and economic issues, the aforementioned articles handle new media issues from a more academic point of view. In addition, the authors I discuss here relate more to my research interests by discussing the potential or future effects of new media on the population or on the news industry itself, rather than discussing the evolution of the technology or the potential to draw a profit from the technology.

When discussing Mobile TV, Orgad makes the following statement: “it seems that at the heart of contemporary discussions on mobile TV is a tension between new and old.” This remark basically sums up the current academic debate not just on Mobile TV, but on any form of new media. Researchers argue whether the many forms of new media combine to create the potential to drastically change the landscape of mass media as we know it, or if new media are simply reinventions of older technologies with a few added twists that in the long will result in relatively little dynamic change. It seems this is the hot question in communication research currently, and one that we are only beginning to find an answer to.

Gordon (2007) toys with the idea of the citizen journalist emerging as a result of the new broadcasting opportunities afforded to many through mobile technologies. He discusses three situations where ordinary citizens have been in the right place at the right time where they stumbled upon an opportunity to record a major media event with the aid of mobile devices. He investigates whether or not this type of citizen journalism can help people to “scoop official sources and thwart censorship and news blackouts.” Again, as Ogden states, this is a debate on how new media “continues to be shaped considerably by the ‘language of the potential’, that is, what the technology might be and how it might affect users (Kennedy, 2008).”

Gordon concludes that while original content can be generated using these devices, it is still distributed and therefore edited by major news organizations. His evidence supports argument that technology, in this case, has not revolutionized journalism, but has merely reinvented the wheel. I argue, however, that citizen journalism is still in its infancy and has not had the time or opportunity to fully evolve into a condition where it will have a significant impact on journalism. Gordon’s article was written in 2007. Since then, Twitter has become a dominant force in social networking. Together with mobile technology, Twitter can be used as a “platform” (see Gillespie, 2010) to lift citizens over the gatekeepers in disseminating original content. As Gillespie states, these new individualized social networking technologies (such as Twitter) are about empowerment. He goes on to stress that, in his view, these technologies are making substantial changes to the media landscape. “This offer of access to everyone comes fitted with an often implicit, occasionally explicit, counterpoint: that such services are therefore unlike the mainstream broadcast­ers, film studios and publishers (p. 353).”

Take the Fort Hood shootings that occurred in 2009 as an example of how citizen journalism is evolving. Everyday citizens who were on site at Fort Hood were able to supply the waiting world with minute by minute updates as to what was happening in real time inside Fort Hood. They not only “scooped” traditional media, but Twitter supplied the technology needed for this information to be disseminated on a wide scale basis. Therefore, with the invention of another technological platform, citizen journalism evolved a tiny step further. With time, the stacked effects this could have on the way the news media works today could be substantial. As Sooryamoorthy et al. (2008) conclude, it is not the adoption of merely one technology that made a difference in how people in India socially interact; but, it was the adoption of multiple technologies that made all the difference.