(Newswire.net — June 8, 2013) Denver, CO. Every time a consumer joins the new media landscape, a producer also joins. This is because it takes the exact same equipment to consume media today, as it does to produce it. People use 1 or 2 devices, to text, watch movies, take pictures, make phone calls, surf the Internet, read and compose emails, and engage with other types of media. “As devices continue to evolve and transform to handle the ever increasing demands for more interactive media, the Internet must continue to evolve and transform to accept and distribute these ever increasing demands,” Sherrie Chastain explains.
For example, when news happens today people are using their mobile devices to grab videos, and photos, they are posting tweets on twitter, and timeline posts on Facebook, sending instagrams, and content of the news unfolds as it is happening. Never before in history has this been possible. Information is no longer private, or has a lag time being reported. News is reported today in real time, by amateurs, in an uncensored natural way that is allowing the real stories to emerge. It is hard for governments to squelch news, as has been done so often in the past.
China has been able to impose the most censorship onto the Internet. They utilize what is commonly known as the Great Firewall of China. The power of the Great Firewall of China was demonstrated during an earthquake in China, where videos, pics, tweets were dominating the Internet during and immediately in the hours that followed the devastation. The prior earthquake took 3 months for the Chinese government to report, however, this one was being reported in real time by citizens.
The Great Firewall of China is a set of observation points that assume that media is produced by professionals, it mostly comes in from the outside world, it comes in relatively sparse chunks, and it comes in relatively slowly. Because of those 4 characteristics the Chinese government was able to filter information as it came into the country. The information about the earthquake was produced by amateurs, locally, in such massive amounts, and being produced so quickly that the Chinese government had no way to filter it as it appeared.
This presented the Chinese government with a dilemma even though they had done a pretty successful job over the past decade of filtering, censoring, and being in control of the Internet within China. They had to choose whether to shut down entire services, because the transformation to amateur media was so massive they could not deal with it any other way. We will have to continue to watch to see how this censorship story unfolds.
“Another thing that we are seeing,” the Internet Marketing coach Sherrie Chastain explains, “is the ability for the audience to essentially talk back. This allows for feedback from the audience to the group sending the initial message. However, the most powerful concept that we must embrace, is the fact that now the audience members can engage and interact with each other. This places the power in the hands of the consumers!
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