Propaganda

Analyse how communications theory can help understanding of the role of new media
Introduction
New media are fast evolving channels of new ways to communicate. It is trendy, often misunderstood, and has been used very successfully and very unsuccessfully by users from individuals to big corporations. It can be seen as a threat to journalism, as evidenced by the ongoing disagreement between Rupert Murdoch and Google regarding access to news articles for free (Bunz, 2009), or as a powerful political tool of the people as used by Mohsen Sazegara to oppose the regime in Iran from another continent (Lamb, 2009). In this essay I am going to explore if and how communication theories apply to new media, and in doing so, see what the role of new media is.
New media, new attributes
Traditional media conveys messages that have been processed and packaged in order to hit deadlines. TV News used to be up to 4 times a day, now it is 24 hours. Radio news is broadcast hourly, newspapers are weekly, daily, twice daily, and magazines are weekly or monthly.
In contrast, new media – for example based on internet capability (on your computer, on your gaming console, on your phone) which includes websites, chat rooms, blogs, micro-blogs, social networking sites are available on demand at any time of the day or night. New media has other new or enhanced attributes over traditional media, some of which are referred to in Richard Houghton’s speech about new media at the ICCO Southeast European Summit on May 2009 (Houghton, 2008) and Johanna Fawkes and Anne Gregory’s paper “Applying communication theories to the Internet” (Fawkes & Gregory, 2000), and these include:
Availability regardless of distance
Speed of availability
Amount of information available
Accessibility and transparency
Availability of the most up to date information
Ability for the public/receiver to interact with the publisher of the media
Media can be interconnected and overlapping e.g. links in articles

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