28TH APRIL: LESSON TIME

QUESTION 3 [45marks]
Essay Title: To what extent do new media technologies make people more creative? (Audience question, not institution.)

MY NMT CASE STUDY IS BLOGGING AND THE DEMOCRATISATION OF JOURNALISM.

New media technologies (NMTs) are seen to pave the way for new products, trends and possibilities for the future. Some say that this will make people more creative, the technology allowing them to put their ideas into action. Others say that it will cause people to much lazier; relying on technology to do all the hard work for them.

One NMT is Blogging, a technology which allows people to have their own space online where they can post text, videos, images and other forms of media and have it viewed publicly.

One way that this could make a User more creative is that they are given the chance to say whatever they want to say and fill their Blog with whatever they would like to show the public. This is a great opportunity and many have taken it upon themselves to post blogs covering every topic or subject that could ever be thought about. This is definite creativity that was never possible before as the only way to achieve this in the past was to have a radio show, be a hired Journalist or be on the television...and even then your views would be censored or filtered if they didn't fit in with the views of the company you were working for.

On the other hand you could say that this creativity will cause laziness in others: instead of actively searching for information in the real world and experiencing things for themselves, they are glued to their computers and other ports of access to the Internet finding things out from other people, depending on other sources of information for their knowledge. This will be detrimental to the creativity of these people as they will become reliant on others and will become content with other people's contributions.

The technology of Blogging is taken further into making people more creative and interactive as many use their blogs to write news stories or comment on news from around the world. This democratisation of journalism promotes creativity as it is not just the big businesses and tabloid papers who are searching for the new stories and new things to write about: it’s the every day blogger searching for their next post too. To become popular and to write a frequently read blog, the blogger needs new and interesting stories and information in order to keep the reader interested.

Blogging has a lack of censorship; many host sites that allow Users to create blogs will have little in the way of rules for content. Myspace does not allow the use of pornographic images but otherwise does not filter the large amount of information that appears on their site. To protect themselves they disassociate themselves with any of the individual views expressed by users of the site which basically grants users the permission to write whatever they want, even if it may hurt another person. Although this allows for creativity as Users are unrestrained, it is a common fear that young people and children using the sites could be put at risk as although there is no age limit for using the site, there is some content which may not be suitable for a young audience.

Another fear is that children are being targeted by paedophiles on Internet networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook and Bebo: the three biggest online networking sites created. People are definitely getting creative by pretending to be people they are not in order to take advantage of others, a practise which parents rightly worry over and children may not fully understand the implications of. Creativity is often put to good use with new technology and ideas emerging all the time, but it can be used very wrongly too. Paedophilia is not the only problem as Phishers (hacking in order to gain access to Users information such as log in details and passwords.), Hackers and Fraudsters are finding more and more ways to carry out illegal actions as they become more and more creative with the technology they are using.

After studying Blogging and the democratisation of Journalism, I think that this NMT advances creativity as it does not curb further ideas, but instead helps those without the technical knowledge show their own creativity in a technological world.