Theme 3: Digitizing of old media

With each passing year, technology advances more and more. Media that some thought would never change are becoming digitalized and transformed to be more accessible for the users/audience. For example: people now have the option of reading a book on their iPad or Kindle, or even listening to a podcast of someone else reading it for them instead of having to carry around a book. Things in paper form are becoming obsolete, and the more electronically-ready something is, the more likely it is to survive. In a piece entitled “For the love of reading,” the author experimented with different mediums to use in order to read, and found that she loved having the actual book and experience of reading overall. For many others, things like reading a book or reading a newspaper are the same for them - even if they are reading on a screen because we live in a fast-paced world where convenience often wins over quality.

Newspapers are facing the same problem as books, but on a grander level. Newspaper revenue relies heavily on ads, and so, with newspapers moving online, the ads now must also move online. The subscriptions that papers get are now also jeopardized because people can get their news for free after just logging onto their computers. The industry itself has had to adapt to the digitizing of society, and now the “old” newspaper has no choice but to move online. If certain newspapers can not adapt, they’ll basically be extinct.

The next type of changing media is the well-known song decoder, Pandora. Pandora has brought something new to personalized radio. By choosing only one song, “musicologists” are able to match your song preference to songs that are similar in genre and style. The result is a fascinating smorgasbord of music you might not have ever heard, or might have forgotten about. I believe that radio’s future looks promising in the form of Pandora because it will give new artists a chance to be listened to by a wide audience, and it will seem almost accidental when a new fan is created. DJ’s and radio stations are told to play certain types of music as priority because of how much they’re paid, and I’d like to believe that Pandora has allowed for it to be fairer for new artists.