IRJMSH Volume 5 Issue 1 online ISSN 2277 – 9809

Power of digitization in Mass Media

By Subhash Chand

Digitization continues to be a key growth driver for the Indian Media and Entertainment
industry and this trend was even more pronounced in 2010. Film studios saw greater adoption of
digital prints over physical and it was the first time in India that digital music sales surpassed that
of physical unit sales. DTH achieved a robust growth of 75 percent in the net subscriber base
over 2009, by adding 12 million subscribers. The government is also attempting to gradually
shift towards increased digitization and addressability by making it mandatory to convert to
digital addressable infrastructure by March 31, 2015.

With the regulatory push on digitization, increasing mobile and broadband penetration and
ongoing 3G rollouts, the market for digital distribution platforms is only expected to grow.
Increasing audience segmentation is catering to different tastes and thereby driving content and
delivery. Television showed signs of this growing trend through the launch of several new niche
channel genres - from India's first 24-hour food channel to a dedicated channel for Hollywood
Action movies dubbed in Hindi.

Any media content that is digital can be stored as the 1s and 0s of computer code, including text,
audio, pictures, and video. This digital content can be delivered via different media, such as a
compact disk (CD), digital video disk (DVD), or digital radio or television broadcast signal. By
itself, the shift from analog (nondigital) to digital media content was significant. A music CD,
for example, has different properties than a phonograph record; CDs typically have lower audio
quality, but they are immune from the accumulation of scratches and pops that eventually plague
vinyl records. And identical copies of a CD‟s content can be made easily on a computer.

However, much more significant changes developed when digital media content was united with
the Internet. The Internet is the communications platform on which digital media content can be
delivered to a wide variety of devices, including desktop computers, wireless laptops,
smartphones, and other mobile devices. Over the past few decades, the growth of digital media,

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the rise of the Internet, and the proliferation of mobile devices have combined to burst open the
very meaning of mass media in several ways (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Lister et al. 2009). First,
the Internet blurs the distinction between individual and mass audiences, and replaces the one-to-
many model of traditional mass media with the possibility of a manyto-many web of
communication. This can be seen as people use the Internet and digital content for individual
communication with single known recipients (e-mail, instant messaging), small group
communication with a limited number of recipients (forums, Social networking sites,
microblogging like Twitter), and mass communication with an unlimited number of unknown
recipients (websites, blogs, streaming video).

This blurring of the boundaries between communication to individuals and communication to a

large audience has led observers to often replace the language of mass media with that simply of
media (though we will see later that there is still good reason to pay attention to distinctions in
audience size). Second, the notion of known senders and anonymous receivers becomes
problematic on the Internet.

The producer of media content may remain anonymous to the typical reader, listener, or viewer,
such as when no identifying information is provided on a website or blog. This opens the door to
mischief, as with spam e-mail and false information or rumormongering through blogs or
anonymous websites. On the other hand, with the Internet, the audience is sometimes known by
the producer, as when registration is required to access a website, join an online community, post
comments on a site, or receive an electronic mailing. Even when we do not supply personal
information to websites—or use fictitious identities—we still leave our digital footprint (in the
form of our computers‟ IP addresses).

This changes the relationship between users and producers because, as we will see, advertisers
on the Internet can know a good deal more about the identities and behaviors of those they seek
to reach than they ever could with traditional mass media. Third, with “new” media,
communication is often potentially interactive, rather than being one way. For example, readers
of newspaper websites can provide instant feedback on a story, shoppers can post their own
product reviews at online retail sites such as Amazon.com, and viewers can comment or vote to
“like” or “dislike” a video on YouTube.

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Interactivity can also mean that users are able to employ these media to communicate with each
other. Finally, the interactive capacities of “new” media blur the distinction between producers
and receivers. Not only can audiences comment on or respond to media content created by
others, but the widespread availability of digital media tools means that people with relatively
modest financial resources and basic technological literacy can create their own media content
and contribute to or alter content on other media platforms. The require- ments for such a task
are still insurmountable hurdles for the world‟s impoverished and illiterate—and indeed the
majority of the world‟s population—but the creation of media content is within the grasp of more
people than ever, especially in more affluent countries. People can create blogs and websites,
upload videos, post their photographs, and engage in a host of other activities. They can also
contribute content to existing sites by, for example, using a television station‟s website to submit
photos and video that might be broadcast. In some cases, the traditional terms audience and even
readers no longer accurately reflect the active role of what can be called more appropriately
users of the “new” media.

Technological Determinism

We can think of technological determinism as an approach that identifies technology, or

technological developments, as the central causal element in processes of social change. In other
words, technological determinists emphasize the “overwhelming and inevitable” effects of
technologies on users, organizations, and societies (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2006: 21).
Sociologist Claude Fischer (1992) characterizes the most prominent forms of technological
determinism as “billiard ball” approaches, in which technology is seen as an external force
introduced into a social situation, producing a series of ricochet effects.

From this perspective, technology causes things to happen, albeit often through a series of
intermediary steps. For example, the invention of the automobile might be said to cause a
reduction in food prices because the automobile “reduced the demand for horses, which reduced
the demand for feed grain, which increased the land available for planting edible grains,” making
food less expensive (Fischer 1992: 8).

The problem, however, is that there is no human agency in this type of analysis. The
technological determinist‟s view is all structural constraint and no human action. It argues that

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technological properties demand certain results and that actual people do not use technologies so
much as people are used by them. In this view, society is transformed according to a technical,
rather than a human, agenda.

Conclusion

We have traveled a long way in this chapter, from the differing capacities of media technologies
To the intervention of social forces in shaping the development, application, and influence of
such technologies. We have seen the pitfalls of a technologically deterministic view that neglects
the role of human agency while also considering how media technologies contribute to the social
environment in which we live. This overview reminds us that media technologies are always
embedded in specific social, economic, and political contexts. Social change is not linear; it
involves the various “tugs-of-war” described in this chapter that can sometimes lead to
unexpected developments. Citizens don‟t always use media technologies as they are initially
packaged. User habits change; Internet sites and platforms that are tremendously popular today
may well fall out of favor to be replaced by new favorites. Corporate players will continue to try
to shape the new technologies in ways that benefit their search for profits. And, by their action
or inaction, governments will continue to influence the development and use of new media. The
direction of such change is uncertain, but we know that the future of new media will be
determined by the actions of people, not by any quality inherent in the technology.

References

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 Fu, Rocky (2011), „China Internet Statistics and Analysis,‟ based on data from China
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