Sams final part of the essay with references

Challenges to Society

Although media convergence offers many opportunities to society, it also poses many challenges too. At present day, media “convergence is throwing up new media services at a prodigious rate” (McQuail, D., Siure, K. 1998. Chapter 7), this makes it difficult for society to keep up with every single adaption and addition. However due to most media services being made available on your mobile phone, society feels pressured to keep up-to-date with all of the latest news, apps and technology. This point is well illustrated in this quote taken from the book Media/Society: Industries, Images and Audiences “Talking about social life without including a discussion of the role of mass media risks missing an important element of contemporary society” (Croteau, D., Hoynes, W. 2003. p.16).

Another challenge to society is that people are now informing themselves of the news through the many different media platforms, before socialising with others. “Couples talk over the radio at breakfast as they read the morning paper” (Croteau, D., Hoynes, W. 2003. p.16), this quote implies that media convergence has become such a large section of our lives, so much that we are spending more time engaging with media platforms, than we are not engaging with them. This challenges society as people are socialising less and less with one another the more different media platforms are created, or if they do socialise, it is usually through using media convergence.

Due to the many different media platforms we experience in our everyday life, each of them expressing their own views, a modern challenge to society is to question the media content we are all consuming. “We base most of our knowledge of government on news accounts rather than experience”, this highlights how we “relate to the world of politics” (Croteau, D., Hoynes, W. 2003. p.15), but this can be extended to all media texts. This is because we are unknowingly consuming many different media texts in our everyday life, which could in turn change our views and personal opinions of the subject matter. This relates to the Hypodermic Needle Model where the audience (society) is seen as passive, this means that they are easily influenced by the media and they do not question what media texts are expressing.

Media convergence, in terms of citizen journalism and social networking, has also become a challenge to society. This is because pro-sumers, or citizen journalists, can easily upload media texts to the Internet for the rest of the world to see, but this uploaded information may not necessarily be reliable. A citizen journalist can be anyone who uses “the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create… media on their own”, therefore they have no “professional journalism training” (Glaser, M. 27.09.2006) or rules and regulations to follow.  Hence they can upload any media text to the web. This is a challenge to society as it is hard for consumers to distinguish between what is trustworthy information and what is not. An example of where false citizen journalism quickly had a dramatic affect on a well-known company was back in 2008, when an anonymous pro-sumer posted on CNN’s iReport that Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. Within the 25 minutes it took for Apple to crush the allegation, people had began to Tweet and re-post the story on social networking sites, this in turn led to Apple’s stock taking a hit (Dunford, A. 08.08.2008).

Continuing from the previous point, media convergence challenges society as it is difficult to know what Internet sources are reliable. In a survey respondents said they loved how they can get information from different news sites, but they only read the ones they feel get it right (Ostertag, S. F. 2008). This also highlights the fact that there are now so many ways to access similar media stories (due to media convergence), however many of them are from unreliable sources.

A challenge to a section of society, journalists, is that they are expected to work 24/7 and create news stories ‘on the move’ due to media convergence. The quote “multiple deadlines create new time constraints” (Storsul, T., Stuedahl, D. 2007. pp. 74-75) emphasises the fact that journalists are expected to work continuously; this will put strains on their lives outside of work.

Croteau, D., Hoynes, W. (2003). Media Society: Industries, Images and Audiences. 3^rd Ed. Sage Publications. (pp. 15-16).

Dunford, A. (08.08.2008). Economic Downturn, Honesty in Communications and Steve Jobs’ Health. Rocket Watcher.

Glaser, M. (27.09.2006). Your Guide to Citizen Journalism. Media Shift.

McQuail, D., Siure, K. (1998). Media Policy: Convergence, Concentration and Commerce. Sage Publications. (Chapter 7).

Ostertag, S. F. (2008). Negotiating News: A Study of the Social Construction of News Realities. University of Connecticut.

Storsul, T., Stuedahl, D. (2007). Ambivalence Towards Convergence, Digitalization and Media Change, Nordicom. (pp. 74-75).