Old Media to New Media; which is better?

Stephen Shepard’s piece of work discussed the issue of the conventional media changing to the new media – going online as well as cell phones. In addition, he also argued the pros and cons of the issue of old media moving to the new media.

With the advancement of technology, more and more people have access to internet. In order to gain more readership or viewership, media owners, especially the print media are following the trend where they are evolving and changing genres from the conventional form to the electronic form.

With electronic devices, media workers emphasize on multimodality (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Other than texts, there are also images, videos, sound effects, music and etc. All these elements add liveliness and interactivity to the audience. On internet, media workers use intratextuality and intertextuality (Walsh, 2006 p25) to let readers fill in the gaps and allowed readers to hyperlink to other similar and related sites (Schirato & Yell, 1996 p110).

I agree with Shepard (2005) that old and new media each have their advantages and disadvantages. Some form of writings especially lengthy ones can’t work well in electronic devices. Users tend to scan texts when reading on screens because reading on screens is 25 per cent slower than reading on paper (Nielsen, 2006).

As long as media workers fulfill the audience’s demand and at the same time, messages are carried out effectively with high quality, it doesn’t matter what forms are used (whether it is the old media or the new ones)!

References:

Kress, G., van Leeuwen, T. 2006, Reading images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed.) Routledge, London

Nielson, J. Writing for the Web (9 parts) [Online, accessed 4 May 2007]
URL: http://www.sun.com/980713/webwriting/

Shepard, S. 2005, New Media vs. Old - A False Dichotomy [Online, accessed 5 May 2007]
URL: http://www.sajaconvention.org/2005/06/stephen_shepard.html

Schirato, T. & Yell, S. 1996, Chapter 5: Framing contexts, Communication and cultural literacy: an introduction, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards NSW, p.90-117

Walsh, M. 2006, ‘“Textual shift”: examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian journal of language and literacy, Vol 29 No 1, pp 24-37